This weekend just gone was Thanksgiving here in Canada. It’s a good concept for a holiday, but I find that having not been brought up with it, it’s a little hard to really go all out for. Though having said that, it did provide us with a long weekend and thus a chance to escape The Mac.
With winter not so much looming as crashing down around us, we also saw it as the last chance for the year to get away in the Caravan. We considered a number of options and ended up deciding that we’d go to Edmonton. Growing kids facing a new winter meant a need for some clothes that would extend beyond knees and elbows and as I kept an eye on the deteriorating forecasts, it also meant that if things got a little too chilly, we should be able to get into a hotel.
Weather was my chief concern for the trip as I tend to get a bit nervous about icy roads between here and Edmonton and facing the trip with the caravan as well, you might say that I was shit scared. I was watching the weather, and road reports in the days leading up to the drive and the pessimist in me saw the worst: snow everywhere, sections of roads marked as being in poor condition and general hysteria inducing conditions. When I got home Wednesday I was suggesting that maybe we should be planning a hotel trip rather than the caravan.
The optimist in Caroline laughed in the face of my ‘childish fears’ (my words, not hers) because when she looked at the reports, she didn’t see it from quite the same perspective. I saw patches of road in poor conditions and roads showing conditions to be ‘unkonwn’. To me, the pessimist, an ‘unknown’ condition report means that it could be in a devastating condition, it could be so bad that the bloke that was supposed to report it is stuck in the ditch because of all the black ice that he’d driven over. To Caroline, the optimist, it simply meant that the road was perfectly fine because ‘if there was anything to report, someone would have reported it.’
The fact that it was snowing as I drove home on Saturday afternoon to commence the journey only reinforced my fears, but under the assurances of my optimistic wife, the caravan remained shackled to the back of the car and off we went, snow gently cascading about us. It was only a bit of a flurry, not too bad and the road itself was dry, so that was a good thing.
It also happened to be bloody windy. Big gusty winds kept trying to shift us sideways, which to me, the pessimist, meant that if I hit some ice, there’d be a nice helping sideways shove just at the right time to throw me in the ditch. After the first hour of driving I was able to relax a little. The snow was still falling and the wind was still blowing, but I’d come to terms with it a little and the white knuckle factor was down to a 3/10.
Of course, Caroline was ok, because it was going to get better, but I expected that worse was to come. I was right.
We stopped for dinner 200kms out of Fort Mac and Caroline went in to order while the kids and I waited in the car. And as the sun disappeared over the horizon and it got darker, we waited some more. It was somewhere around there that I turned the light on in the car to keep reading and noticed that the car lights were still on. I’d turned the ignition off though to save fuel, so when Caroline came back and we went to take off, all I got was ‘tick tick tick’. No ignition. Fortunately the girl behind the counter had jumper cables and we were off again in short order. Of course, that wasn’t the ‘worse’ that I’d been expecting.
As we continued our journey through the dark, the snow started to get heavier. If you’ve never driven in snow at night, let me set the scene for you a little. Unlike rain, snow doesn’t hit the windscreen unless its really wet heavy snow and you’re moving at a slow speed. With the powdery snow that we get up this way, as you drive through it, it get’s picked up in the airstream over the top of the car and flies up and over the roof before it ever hits the windscreen. And unlike rain, when the headlights hit the snow, they’re just reflected and your visibility drops dramatically, quicker than is experienced with rain.
The interesting and fun part of it is that as the snow is picked up by the headlights and flies ‘straight at you’ (as a result of driving into it of course) you start to feel like you’re in a star wars movie, because as the snow flies toward you, its just like when they go into hyperspace in star wars and all those white lights suddenly fly past you on the screen. The bad thing is that as it gets denser and denser, you simply can’t see down the road enough. On this occasion, it was bad enough that with no oncoming traffic and no one in front of me, it got to the point that I couldn’t tell where the edge or middle of the road was and whether there was a corner ahead or not. The road turned totally white within minutes as we were enveloped in our own little mini-blizzard.
The white knuckle factor at this point was a solid 10/10. It was going to take some seriously industrial strength extraction to remove my hands from that steering wheel and I felt like my heart wasn’t so much beating the crap out of the inside of my chest, but had more like left my chest cavity, tapped me on the shoulder and leapt out the window with a cheery wave. I could feel the tension in places that had no reason to be tense whilst driving the car, not they cared, they tensed up anyway.
I would have stopped, right then and there had there actually been anywhere to stop, but there was no shoulder to speak of (not that I could tell shoulder from actual road) and it was more likely that someone would crash into us blindly if we were stopped than moving. I took comfort from the fact that when I dared to take a micro second long peek in the mirrors all I could see was a string of headlights behind me about 30 cars long. As I crawled at about 40km/hr, they weren’t going anywhere and so for someone to hit me, they’d have to go well out of their way.
We survived. The snow backed off after probably all of 10 minutes, even if it felt like it had been three hours and we made it all the way to Edmonton where I got to set up the van with the snow quietly (and not densely) falling around us. We cranked up the furnace, crawled into our beds and welcomed ourselves to sleepy bobos!
Of course on the way back, as we left to come home, it started snowing again. As we drove, it got worse. Caroline made a comment like, “I didn’t expect it to be this bad.”
I calmly told her that as resident pessimist, I didn’t think it was as bad as it was going to get and that the 5-10cm of snow that had been forecast for the city on Tuesday was more than likely to arrive early to make the drive once more a nightmare. Fortunately, I was wrong. The drive home was pleasant and we were able to appreciate the beauty of the fresh snow, with a gorgeous fall (that would be autumn for most of you) backdrop, the birches in full colour
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