Let's get the hockey part out of the way first, okay? Trust me-it won't take long. We went 0-3-1 for the weekend- pretty disappointing considering that we had been playing much better lately. We outshot Ft. Collins 29-9 in the first game, and they got two goals on crappy bounces to tie us, 2-2.
The next morning, we played really hard against a good Littleton team, but just came up short by a 3-2 score. After that loss, we really mailed in the rest of the tournament, losing our last two games. So that sucked, but we still had a nice time with the family, except our two little kids were both sick with a bad cold and fever. It's really pretty in Steamboat- we'd never been there during the winter before.
Now, we had been cheating the odds all fall, because we had been up to the mountains three times for either hockey or soccer, and hadn't run into any bad weather. Well, boys and girls, as most of you know, the other shoe dropped Thanksgiving weekend. We got quite a bit of snow up there during the first three days, but Mother Nature saved the worst for our drive home.
I guess the one upside to getting our ass handed to us in hockey was that we got to come home early on Sunday. If we had made the final, we would have played in the afternoon, and there would have been no way to get back, with the amount of snow that was falling at the time.
Our problems started right away back at the condo. We were done with hockey by 9:00, so we went back there to pack and check out. We had heard the weather forecast, so wanted to get our asses out of there by 10:00, and try to beat the traffic on the stretch of I-70 coming home from skiing, or the holiday weekend. That was usually shitty at the best of times, because of the normal weekend volume. Under regular circumstances, it was a 2 1/2 hour trip, but we knew it would be longer because of the snow falling.
Well, after we packed all of our crap into the van, we discovered that we couldn't even get up the hill that led us out of the condo complex. That didn't make me feel very good about our chances of getting up both Rabbit Ears and Loveland passes. We saw some other vehicles getting up the hills, and wondered why we couldn't. Crap, we have decent tires on the van. We then figured out that we had too much weight on our back end, because we had Sam's hockey gear on one of those carriers that attaches to the hitch on the back of the van. It looks like this:
So we decided to put the gear on top of the van, and see if that helped a little. It turns out that it did, and we got out of the complex without too much more trouble. Too much stuff on the back apparently took the weight off the front, and we needed all we could get up there for traction. So we kept the carrier on the back of the van empty.
We got out of town, and came upon our first hurdle, which would be Rabbit Ears Pass, just outside of Steamboat Springs. It wasn't too bad, but started to get real hairy as we climbed in elevation. The snow got harder as we got higher, and by the time we reached the summit, it was getting really slick. But there wasn't too much traffic at that time, which was important because if we had to stop going up a steep hill, we were going to have a situation. But we took it easy and got through that part okay.
It got better as we went down the other side of Rabbit Ears, and we made the 60 miles into Silverthorne without too many problems. The roads were a little bit snowpacked, but nothing I couldn't handle.
We stopped off at Wendy's when we got to Silverthorne, and prepared for the 12 mile trip up to the Eisenhower Tunnel, which we already knew was jammed with cars. There was a sign by the highway entrance that said it would take around 90 minutes to go the 12 miles. But there was no other way to go, so we just got in line with all the other assholes that came up there for the weekend.
I knew it was going to be fugly when it took around 20 minutes just to get on the ramp that leads up to I-70. But we were all pretty patient- we thought that as long as there was a bunch of cars on the road, the conditions would be stay okay.
Uh, wrong.
The higher we climbed towards the tunnel, the harder it was beginning to snow. But as long as we kept moving, we weren't getting stuck. We crossed our fingers, and hoped that we could make the tunnel. Once we got to the other side, we knew we could come down the hill all right. We'd just take it real slow and easy.
Our luck ran out three miles from the tunnel. The climb was too steep, the snow was falling too hard, and the traffic just wasn't moving fast enough. The van stopped, and we couldn't move. Uh-oh.
I thought maybe if I could push the van a little, I could get us moving forward, and get some momentum up the hill. So Annie and I traded places, and I got out and pushed.
It worked for awhile. I would get us moving, Annie would gun it, and we'd make some progress. I would run and jump into the van on the passenger side, and we'd go a little ways, until we'd catch up with the traffic. Then we'd lose our momentum, and start the process all over again.
Now boys and girls, there's funny, there's really funny, and then there's a 50 year old fat boy chasing a van up a mountain at 10,000 feet, trying to jump in the passenger side. If Annie got on a roll, she would drive the van one or two hundred yards, and my chubby ass would be trying to catch up, so she didn't have to stop for me. Plus I was running in snow that was past my ankles.
Not good times.
Needless to say, it didn't take too many atttempts for your hero to run completely out of energy. So we stopped on the side of the road for a bit, so I could get my heart back to hummingbird speed. I figured maybe if the older boys helped push, it might help, plus their weight would be out of the van.
The problem was that the goddamn carrier was still on the back of the van, and the boys couldn't find a spot to help push. So we made an executive decision to take the carrier off,and leave it on the side of the road. We had no place to put it, so we flushed that $60 down the toilet, and took the bastard off.
This is the point in our saga that we made a really, really bad move. Annie asked me if I thought she should put the transmission in low gear. Maybe that would help with the traction. I thought, what the hell? Let's give it a try.
Stupid idea, kids. If you never listen to another thing I say, please pay attention to your Uncle Al for a minute. Never, ever, put your vehicle in low gear and gun the engine. I'll tell you why in just a little while.
She gunned it, the tires spun just like before, and we didn't make much progress. In the meantime, the van started to get exceptionally hot, and made an odor that I'm having a hard time describing. I think maybe if you set fire to a bunch of tires, but dipped all of them in shit first, that might be closest to an accurate description.
Again, not good times.
Well, we pushed as hard as we could, but we weren't going to make it. We pushed the sonofabitch to the side of the road, stopped the engine so it could cool off, and we could ponder our next move. We have AAA, so we could call a towtruck to get us up the hill. The question was, how many hours was it going to take for a towtruck to get to us? It was really getting bad up there, and there were a bunch of cars that were just like us, stranded on the side of the road.
In the meantime, while we were waiting for the van to cool, we started pushing other cars to maybe at least get them going. I mean, what the fuck? We didn't have anything better to do. Those poor suckers were trying to get home just as much as us.
Our savior came about fifteen minutes later. A CDOT (that's Colorado Dept. of Transportation, for those of you not from around here) vehicle was towing cars up the hill to a wide spot to get them the hell out of the way, and he made his way down to us. I thought maybe I could talk him into taking us up to the tunnel, but there were so many cars to move, he didn't have time.
So he hooked us up to his truck, and off we went. About three hundred yards. It wasn't much, but we took it gratefully. At the time, I thought we were a lot closer to the tunnel than three miles. It would have taken us all night to push that bastard up the mountain at the rate we were going before.
But when we got up there, we discovered that the road had been plowed a little bit, and that most of the traffic was still down there where we were before. If we could get the van back on the highway, maybe we could negotiate the three miles?
The truck had taken us off the side of the road, where the snow was piled up about a foot high. The only way we were going to get back on the highway was if I backed down the hill, went through the high stuff, and then started back up again once we got on the main road. That was going to be tough, because there were still cars coming up the hill, and I didn't want to make them stop completely. They'd get stuck again, start calling me names, and that would hurt my little feelings.
So I waited for a good gap, threw it in reverse, and backed onto the highway. That was the easy part. Now would the bastard move when I tried to climb the hill? I rubbed my lucky testicle for good luck (it's the left, by the way).
It moved. Once it grabbed a little pavement, we started moving pretty well. I was determined, one way or the other, that I wasn't going to stop again until we made the tunnel. Fortunately, all the crappy traffic was down the hill, and we got a straight shot to the top of the pass.
So we made the tunnel, and limped the rest of the way home. The van cooled off, but there was that lingering smell that I described earlier, and it stayed with us all the way home. Plus I breathed a bunch of smoke in while I was pushing the sonofabitch up the mountain, and I couldn't stop coughing. The spot I was pushing was right above the tailpipe. I'll bet my lungs look like I've been working in a coal mine.
Wouldn't that be ironic? Never smoked a cigarette in my life, and get a case of the Black Lung from my goddamn van.
We found out a few days later the source of the smell. It was the stench of burning transmission fluid. When we stuck the bastard in low gear, and then gunned the engine, we taxed the transmission to the point where it cooked some of the gaskets. I won't tell you how much it cost to repair, but let's say that's an ouchie that's going to linger for awhile. I had to sell my liver to pay for it. Did I need that?
When I'm coaching baseball, after every game I always ask the kids, "Okay, what did we learn today?" The answer is normally, "Well, we learned that you don't know shit about coaching baseball". And that's from my own kids.Now it's time to ask the same question about our Thanksgiving trip. What did I learn?
1) I learned that I will never, never, ever drive in the mountains again after September without a set of chains in the van. I've never put them on before, but it can't be that tough, can it?
In the worst case, I could attach them to my tennis shoes, and get better traction pushing the van. I wiped out several times pushing that prick. I think I heard the people laughing in the cars behind me.
2) I learned that while I'm packing extra shit, I'd better throw in a defibrillator along with the chains. My heart just resumed beating normally last week. I'll bet that if I had collapsed, my family would have left my frozen body on the side of the mountain, like they do when someone croaks while climbing Everest. I'm fairly certain about that one.
3) I learned that I should have married a big girl, instead of that scrawny little thing I'm with now. Why? My kids would have grown bigger, and they would have been out there pushing instead of my sorry ass. In retrospect, it would have been worth the expense of having to always bring a sack of flour to bed.
(Take just a moment- you'll get that one...)
4) I learned that I need to modify the shift lever in the van, so that we can never put that fucker in low gear again. That may have been the stupidest thing ever.
Wait. The movie "St. Elmo's Fire" is the stupidest thing ever. But this was really close.
No comments:
Post a Comment