Friday, January 8, 2010

Contrite



ahhhh, the weekend is here. This has been a long, cold week. On Monday the weathermen predicted 2-3 inches of snow for Wednesday morning. Nothin doing. On Wednesday they predicted 1-2 inches for Thursday. 8 am Thursday, no white stuff yet. 10 AM it started coming down. People started worrying about getting home, the roads were rumored to be icing up, the weathermen were getting prime airtime in Nashville. I wasn't worried at all...

Until I got stuck! It was last night on a hill in my apartment complex parking lot. That was right after I watched someone else get stuck and I stubbornly thought that they must not know how to drive in the snow. Ha. Little did I know that the hill was covered by a layer of ice. I thought that if I got some momentum, kept a consistent speed and didn't falter I would make it. Nope, 3/4 of the way to the top my tires lost traction and my car started to spin around. So instead of backing down the hill I had to do a 25 point turn to get unstuck from the awkward angle the ice spun me into. I should also tell you that there is a steep drop off on one side of the road.

I feel contritely embarrassed by my pride. "I'm from the North! I know how to drive in the snow!" Turns out most places here don't buy salt because they need it so infrequently. Plus, while driving in weather like this, it would be wise to be very very careful because most of the people around you are freaked out by the snow. :) okay that's a little exaggerated, but only a little!

My co-workers even wear different footwear and clothing when snow is threatening to come. I could talk about the shovels northerners keep in their cars, or the long drive I used to have to campus in every kind of weather, or the multiple inches of snow that accumulate without care-- But I just got finished telling you how I was humbled yesterday. So I won't. ;)

1 comment:

  1. I've never tried to drive in snow. I'm pretty sure I would crash before I drove 10 feet! It snowed in Portland a few weeks ago - just light snow, like an inch, but we get snow so infrequently that everyone freaked out, and it took hours to drive anywhere.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for stopping by. I'd love to hear from you!