Snow Day

This particular "snow day" happened over two weeks ago (January 8th to be exact), but I still feel a need to document it after all this time. It was a little traumatizing for me. I guess I got soft from all those years in Houston.

I woke up Tuesday morning to several inches of snow. Immediately I started worrying about taking Caleb to preschool because it was going to be at a house located near or in the county park (think woods and camping) and I remembered the mom briefly commenting back in August that if there happened to be snow during the winter months when she was suppose to teach we might need 4 wheel drive. So I go about my morning and nobody calls so I figure everything is fine. It was all fine until I safely delivered Caleb to preschool and then tried to return home. This house is located at the bottom of a smallish hill. On my way out I made it about 5 feet from the top of said hill and then started sliding back down. This totally freaked me out because the van started turning sideways and I couldn't do a thing about it. After several long minutes I finally get the van backed down the hill thinking I would just have to start farther back and get more speed for a second try. I literally couldn't even get it to go forward 1 foot.



For visual effect.





Brayden's mom, who also happens to be named Kara, happens to have a van with actual snow tires on it. Amazingly enough, she could make it all the way up the hill, not just within 5 feet of the top! I guess they really do work! She was a saint...she drove me to two different stores to find tire chains which turned into a bigger ordeal than I anticipated. Apparently tire stores don't sell tire chains and the man at the auto parts store can't look up what size tires are on your minivan. So instead of having preschool mom drive me clear back into the woods again, I called a friend to get the number of another friend who has the exact same minivan as me and had her read me the numbers off of her tires (risky I know, but I was about to lose it at this point). So after my third trip into the store I came out the proud owner of new tire cables!


More visuals.


















Everything after that went smoothly. I got the cables on, got the van up the hill and when preschool was over the teaching mom brought the kids up the hill in her 4 wheel drive. Big sigh of relief...it's all over and we're all safe.

But wait, it's not all over yet! I about wrecked again as I was pulling into our driveway. For those of you that don't know what our house looks like it may be hard to visualize. I'd go take a picture, but it's dark and really cold outside. Our driveway is quite steep and in the winter when the driveway hasn't been cleared you have to get a running start to make it into the garage. We also have big swells (they look like big grass ditches) at the bottom of our lot next to the road with a pipe running under the driveway connecting the swells on either side. I started sliding half-way through my turn into the driveway and came within inches of going hood first over the side of the driveway and pipe into the swell.

I think this last little incident put me over the edge because I don't really remember anything after this. I was just really ready to be done driving in the snow for the day and I'm seriously considering purchasing some snowtires in the near future.