My wife knows. She's with me.

It was largely her idea.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

From just outside Accident I see a white church steeple. As I get closer, I notice the speed limit drops like a guillotine from 55 to 40 and to 25 - and a police car idling next to the church. It's probably set to pounce on out-of-towners who didn't brake down fast enough. When you're a town of 353, you do what you've got to do.

Accident got its name in Colonial times from a surveying mistake, but I guess Mistake would be a town name not even the Chamber of Commerce could love.

The sweet, blue-eyed blonde is my granddaughter and my visit to see her coincided with a column I did earlier this month on Jeff Pergament, who is being denied access to his granddaughter.

My granddaughter's name is Samantha Jo-Ann, nicknamed Sammi Jo - which is too cute - and she nearly left my life following the estrangement between her mother and her father, who is my son. What happened between them is between them, but the fallout splattered on me.

Because of the estrangement, the distance and the occasional difficulty in reaching Sammi Jo's mother, I started thinking about calling it quits.

That's when Baby Cakes stepped in.

She grew up with only one set of grandparents, including one warm old grandmother who is still happily with us. Because she was denied the other set, Baby Cakes always felt shorted.

Grandparents can be important, influential in a child's life. Mine were. They augment parents in a loving, nonjudgmental way.

Baby Cakes didn't want Sammi Jo, who turns 8 this month, to miss that. I think she also wanted to save me from later regrets.

So, the effort was made and so was the visit.

We're on the road for 316 miles, 5 1/2 hours, with almost four hours on the Turnpike (sticker shock on the recently increased cost of tolls), and one hour in the pleasant Appalachian woods and rolling hills of western Maryland.

We make a rest stop in Accident, where I buy an Accident T-shirt for Baby Cakes and a coffee mug for me that says "Accident." When it spills, we'll know why.

In West Virginia, it's family time. I give Sammi Jo her first ride on a real horse, I step in manure at the petting zoo (the animals are on loan from local farms) and we lunch at the lodge at Blackwater Falls State Park. After lunch, we chase each other around for a while on the lawn overlooking the high, narrow falls nearly buried in the thick forest.

That evening, Sammi Jo invites me to a cakewalk.

Cakewalk? That's a Mummers' dance.

Here, it turns out, cakewalk is something else.

Basically, it's musical chairs without the chairs, but with a spinning wheel of fortune. You put a quarter on a number and if it comes up, you win a cake.

To get to the cakewalk, we traveled 18 miles over a snake of two-lane blacktop to a VFW hall in the next town. A neighbor was ailing and the cakewalk's purpose was to raise money. It was well-organized, with dinner (hot dogs and hamburgers) for sale, relatively sophisticated with both a regular and silent auction.

There were about 60 country people, who brought more than 30 cakes, in the barn of a VFW building. Sammi Jo sat between me and Baby Cakes and didn't win, while we did. We gave her our cakes, but getting isn't the same as winning. She kept betting quarters and has to learn to cut her losses when she's on a bad streak. Maybe that's my job.

Everything was donated by the neighbors. While it might have been easier to donate the money everyone spent on hot dogs, hamburgers, buns, soda, flour, butter, sugar, preserves, etc., that misses an important point. These mountain people don't cotton to cash handouts. Besides, the cakewalk became Saturday night's entertainment.

Despite Sammi Jo's bad luck, the visit was a winner. Back on the Turnpike for the long pull home, I think about how Jeff Pergament's daughter is keeping him from his granddaughter, and how much all three of them are losing.

I know Baby Cakes was right noodging me to stay linked with mine.

And that was no accident. *

E-mail stubyko@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5977. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/byko.