| | | | | | Sunday, February 20, 2005 |
Car day or How I almost died
| | So, wow have I got a story for you! Yesterday, I woke up at 9:30am to go to my aunt's 40th birthday brunch... I got in the car and drove to my parents house. Because of construction, this ended up taking an hour and a half, instead of fifty minutes...but whatever, I made it, it wasn't so bad. The brunch thing went well... so until about 5pm, I got food, I got clean clothes, I got my car tuned up, and I got to spend time with my family! It was a win win win decent thing. Then at five, I started on the road to reno. Now, to get to reno from my parents house is about 3.5 hours in the car, less if you speed. That is a long time to be in a car. Once I got in the car, it started raining... and the clouds were almost fog, you could see them that close to the ground... so it was very very trecherous, but not anything that going 55 and hunching over the wheel to try and see the road can't fix... except with the traffic that made you go about 15-30 FOR NO REASON. So, an hour and a half later, I made it back to my place (well I bought a CD and a sandwhich, because I was already stir crazy from the car). I then get ready to go over to Nevada. Most of the way until the mountains was about equivalent to what I went through before, but then once I reached over 3000 in elevation, the rain turned to snow. Now, I am from California, and about 60-70% of this state never really gets snow (or better yet, an even smaller percentage of the people in CA ever get to see real snow yearly). It was okay until about 30miles to Donner... then it was bad, so they made us put on chains (as in I paid $20 for a nice man to do it). Well, cool I'd never driven with chains before, and boy what a fun experience that was (its like a plane is constantly in the process of taking off, and following your car making it vibrate in a really unsexy dentist drill way). So crawling around at 2-10 for several miles while everyone puts their chains on... the snow starts to get really bad. It was like there was this white wormhole in the upper left corner of my windshield that wanted to suck me in. Then I noticed... that my car was rapidly over heating. I remembered what Frank said, and turned the heater on full blast, and it slowly went down... but I start to over heat... I am not sure how much time went by... but finally we got past the second chains check... and then thigns got really hairy. See, there was these highway snow sweepers, that everybody passed because we were sick of going 10 (I mean damn the new speed limit was 30, and we were going at a crawl for a long time... I am sure over an hours worth). But, all of us weren't thinking, see if the sweepers don't get a chance to clear the snow... its fucking everywhere. we started out with two lanes... and then ended up with one... I can't see anything but the rear lights of the car ahead of me... suddenly he stops. I am about 100yds away from him going (and I checked) 17, I hit my brakes... and I slow, but don't stop. I come within 2ft of hitting him, and the only reason I didn't was because he started moving again. That whole moment was one long drawn out fuuuuuck. So, to keep from panicking (I almost lost the car ahead of me... and was entertaining thoughts of just wandering off the highway... and down the mountains resulting in firey death, or worse, being stuck and dying a snowing protracted death)... I went to my escape mechanism. I turned on Skeelo (and then paul Oakenfold), and started shouting the lyrics really loudly, so that I would have to concentrate on the lyrics rather than death. So yeah... I went for like thirty miles, then the snow let up, and I had to take the chains off (right outside of Truckee...so on the edge of nowhere)... that was a pain and a half. By now I've called my parents and frank, and everyone as a group is worrying. well... I took them off by myself but not without a lot of curses, cuts, and calls (to frank). If I had had a flashlight, that would have been awesome.
(jump cut) my parent's garage, on top of the dryer... sits my flashlight, which six hours earlier I had taken OUT of my laundry basket thinking, "what is this thing doing in here" and never put back in.
(resume narration) Yeah, so I got them off and continued to reno, after calling everyone back to let them know I was alive, and out of danger. And that was mostly true... the only thing wrong now was the fact that the snow on my windshield had melted, but when I went to try and wipe it off... it refroze to my windshield in a nice smeary haze. Then it melted again, leaving me with a nasty brown film all over my windshield, so that when every car coming the other way passed by me... I couldn't see shit. So it wasn't until Boomtown that I was able to go the speed limit. I showed up at Frank's house... at 11:40pm... having left at five, with cut up and dirty hands, a wet and icy pair of pants, a really sore knee, and a few tears (as a reward for not crying once during the whole debacle).
yeah, so I took a shower, we rented a movie, we finished off my whalers... and then went to sleep. It was nice, finally, it was nice.
posted by Amber at 11:20 AM
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