September Marathon Travel

Stephen and I just got back from a long, busy weekend with family.

On Thursday, we traveled to eastern Washington to visit my grandparents and my sister, who is currently living with them. After a 6-hour drive, we arrived at their house about 10:30 and spent an hour and a half chatting with them until we all hit the hay.

On Friday we traveled 2-1/2 hours up to Coeur d'Alene to spend a day at Silverwood Theme Park, part 1 of our anniversary. We started with a nice, easy ride--the log ride, which is a slow, gentle float down a man-made stream, followed by one hill and drop before the end of the ride. After that, we decided we were ready for a more adventurous ride and went straight to the Timber Terror, a roller coaster that had me screaming for all 2700 rattling feet of it. We were rather shaken after getting off it, but Stephen enjoyed it enough that he went on another (albeit nicer!) roller coaster. I think my limit is about 1 roller coaster ride per visit.

Stephen also went on the Panic Plunge, a ride I refused to go on with him. It lifts you up 140 feet into the air and then just lets you go. In spite of knowing just how it worked and that he would come to a gentle stop at the end, Stephen left the ride with muscle soreness from tensing up so much as he braced for impact with the ground!

We went on Thunder Canyon and got our shorts and shoes soaked in 79-degree, partly cloudy weather, but it was a fun ride nonetheless. It's actually my favorite ride there, and I would have multiple times if 1) it had been warmer and 2) I had worn quicker-drying clothing than denim! Silly me.

We also did bumper cars, and a ferris wheel with a twist that scared me WAY more than I had expected! This particular ferris wheel balances at a 45-degree angle from the ground, so unlike normal ferris wheels, there is NOTHING between you and the ground--or, in this case, a man-made lake used for bumper boats. The ride was very smooth and gentle, and would have been truly enjoyable if I'd only been able to stop thinking of myself plummeting into the lake below. I clung to Stephen for dear life on the down-turn and just prayed to the Lord that we wouldn't get stuck at the top when the ride came to an end.

After all the rides, we each got GIANT "single scoop" ice cream cones that were delicious, but impossible to finish. We ended up throwing half our ice cream away but eating the waffle cones. :) After ice cream we took our time walking toward the exit, stopping in several of the fun shops along the way, including one to get Stephen some coffee and me some tea. We also walked by "Old Tyme Muggs," a place to get old-fashioned dress-up photos taken, and couldn't resist the temptation. Silverwood's theme is the Old West, so we dressed up saloon-style. I have to say, that was by far my favorite part of the entire day. I adore playing dress-up. Finally, we stopped in a gift shop and I bought myself a very pretty necklace that I will probably wear a lot.

We arrived back at my grandparents' house at 10:00, hardly earlier than the day before, which was sad. Again we all talked for about an hour and a half until Grandma and Grandpa retired to bed, and then spent another 2 hours talking with my sister. :) It was a good thing for all of us, I think.

Saturday we took it easy and spent most of the day with the grandparents and my sister. At 7:00 My old youth group friend Beth was getting married to the love of her life. It was nice, simple wedding. The wedding was outdoors, and the reception was indoors at the church Beth attends now. They served dessert and we all ate way too much sugar. There was dancing, which was an intriguing thing to watch, because half the crowd there was from the Nazarene church that Beth and I grew up in, and Nazarenes don't dance. It's no longer forbidden in the Nazarene manual, and much of the younger crowd has taken it up, but it's strongly discouraged among my grandparents' generation, and just not done in my parents' generation. I wondered very much how the traditional Nazarenes were feeling as they watched the non-Nazarenes and non-traditional Nazarenes dance. Stephen and I joined briefly but found we were very rusty!! It's been a long time since we danced, and we mutually decided we really need to pick it up again. :S

After the wedding and reception we got some "real" food from the local burger joint, which is still, in my opinion, the best burger place ever. :) The evening was spent in our usual way--talking, joking, telling stories. We normally play games at least once while we're home, but all 3 nights we were there, we were just too tired! It's a shame--we'll have to do that next time we're in town.

Sunday we went to my old church that I still love. It looked so empty! It was rather alarming until I realized that it was Labor Day weekend, and a lot of families were probably on vacation somewhere. After church was our usual Sunday dinner eating out--my family has done that for as long as I can remember! Usually it's Shari's, or IHOP, or some restaurant like that, but we had just eaten at IHOP the day before and went for fast food instead. Sadly, Stephen and I had to leave shortly after lunch to drive 6 hours across the state to his parents' home. That hadn't been in the original plan, but Stephen's brother and sister-in-law were home, and we never get to see them, so we decided to make it work. The drive there and the drive back brought our travel time up to 1500 miles in 5 days!

We took it really easy with Stephen's family. The most exciting things we did were to walk down to a creek together and go to a farmer's market. :) It was good to see Tim and Mary and everyone again, though. We learned that Stephen's dad's parents will be in town next month, the weekend right after our anniversary, so we will be doing more marathon traveling at the beginning of October. And then it's time to figure out the holidays... Oh boy. I'm starting to understand why years go faster as you get older.

Our final leg of the trip was 3 hours long, and we unfortunately had to drive straight to a meeting with some people from our church about a service we have begun for Saturday nights. Thanks to a miscommunication, we were an hour late, but we still got to eat some food and throw in our thoughts about possible plans for the service. Then we at last drove home to quietness, our kitty, and our own bed. Oh how nice!

I am too tired to write anything more, and looking much too forward to that nice bed... So I bid you good night! Perhaps I'll wrap this up better later.

Oh, The Optimism of Youth: A Comedy in Five Acts

Prologue

What a humiliating day.

I've let Steve do most of the driving these last few days, since I've never driven in snow this bad before, but after a few days I decided I'd been in it enough to have learned some lessons.  Enough lessons to try braving it myself.  I had packages to mail and wanted to see if KMart had ice scrapers or if they were out of everything winter like Fred Meyer's.

Act 1

The first task to overcome was just to get out my car out of the parking lot.  The driver's side was free, but I was parked next to a snowbank on the passenger side.  The snow was piled halfway up my tires.  I took out my handy-dandy ice-chipper-scraper (I love that thing) and started hacking away at the snow.

I didn't realize that that particular area hadn't been cleared out since the freezing rain on Sunday.  I got down through 5 or 6 inches of snow and hit ice.  It was easy enough to get out, though, 'cause it wasn't frozen to my car or anything.  I just reached down with my gloved hands and pulled up the chunks.

I'd uncovered my front tire most of the way and decided to try getting out, although there was still snow piled up against the body of the car.  I hopped into the driver's seat and timidly tried backing out.  It went pretty easily for a sec, but stuck again.  I hopped back out and dug away at some of the snow against the body, observing that my car had moved a good 5-6 inches.  I figured what it really needed was just oomph.  The snow was coming away really easily.

So I got back in and put it in reverse once more.  Making sure nobody was behind me, I started to back up, but suddenly wasn't sure which way to back out.  Toward the snow bank or away from the snow bank or straight out?

I should mention that my car has terrible turning radius.

I continued backing out, indecisively turning my tires this way and that before finally deciding to back out toward the snow bank.  By that time the tires were cleared of it anyway... I had to go the long way to get out of the parking lot, but that didn't matter.  Task #1 completed.

Act 2

Task #2 was to manage the Tualatin-Sherwood Rd. in the middle of 2:30 traffic.  It took forever to even get out of my apartment complex, traffic was so backed up at the first light, but somebody was nice and let me in.

So!  Now the real excitement began!  Thankfully the roads were semi-slushy, but they had deep ruts.  That might've been a problem for my PT.  On top of a sucky turning radius, the bottom of my car has pretty low clearance.  I wondered if I would be able to drive in ruts 6" deep.

On my way down Tualatin-Sherwood, I stayed in the left lane headed for the post office, thinking for some dumb reason that I was going to go past the part of the road where it merges into one lane.  About 5 blocks before the light I should've turned at, I realized the post office was on the righthand side of the road, well before the road merges into one lane.  Unfortunately traffic was way slow in the right lane and there was no way for me to get in at that point.

Nobody was in the left side of the road except me (good thing? bad thing?), so I kept swinging along, averaging about 12 mph on a normally 35 mph road, and about 7 mph faster than the traffic on my right.

Two and a half blocks before the light I should've turned at, I discovered why traffic was so slow over there: two semi trucks with hazard lights on were moving at a very slow pace and holding traffic up.  All of a sudden I saw the sign for Haggen's and Staples just ahead of the trucks, the shopping area I was supposed to turn in at.  Oh great!  How was I going to get past these trucks in time??  I couldn't go much faster or I'd be a danger to everybody, including myself.

But I was going faster enough than those trucks to shoot ahead of them just in time for the light by the Haggen's sign.  I had enough space to bump and slide and bumble my way into the right lane in front of the trucks and still turn before they got to me.

The light turned red and I prayed that my eyesight hadn't fooled me and those trucks were going slow enough to have enough stopping space to not squish me.

Then I realized there was a green right-turn arrow under the red light.

Oh, praise God, I get to turn!

As I turned into the parking lot, I realized that I was still a block away from the light I should've turned at.

Oh well.  There is more than one route through that parking lot to the post office.

Act 3

I wondered as I pulled into the post office parking lot if there was going to be a forever-long line of people trying to get those packages in at the last minute.  Or, was the post office even going to be open?  So many places were closed 'cause the workers couldn't get to work.

I slid and shuffled my way up to the doors and realized, thankfully, that they were open and that there were only two people in there.  I got service relatively quickly, and after another $12.00 out of my rapidly diminshing "play money" from my pre-marriage bank accounts, I sent off the packages to be delivered "I have no idea when", in the words of the post office man.

"Noooo problem, I'm sure my family will understand," I laughed.  They already knew they were going to be late anyway, and with this weather?  I wasn't surprised at all.

Off to KMart.  That meant harrowing the infamous Tualatin-Sherwood Rd again, although for a much shorter trip.  As I sat at the left-turn light, I wondered if I was even on it enough to trigger it.  People had been having so much trouble with that lately, sitting at red lights for several turns before choosing another route.

This one was good, though.  My car's kind of heavy anyway, that probably helped.

At the left-turn light into the KMart parking lot, traffic was backed up so much that I couldn't even get into the left-turn lane until the other lights went green and people moved forward.  Finding a parking space was tricky too... Everyone's flocking all the department stores for that last-minute Christmas shopping plus any "HELP! It's winter in Portland and I'm not prepared!!!" shopping.

Eventually I got into the store, which, for the parking spaces taken up outside, was surprisingly unchaotic.  The only thing was I hadn't been in a KMart for years and I had no idea where the ice scrapers were or even if they had any.  But I followed my instinct and tiptoed my way back to what looked like the car section.

It took some searching, but I finally found the aisle for winter car care, only to find (not surprisingly) everything out of stock.  That was okay; my hopes hadn't been too high anyway.  I just wanted an excuse to get out of the apartment.

I wandered the store a bit, loathe to attack the streets in a 2000 lbs of metal again.  I looked at some hideous snow boots, the only reasonable snow footwear they had left in the shoe section, and decided I was doing okay with my current shoes.

Act 4

When I got back out to my car, I realized the snow piled on top of my car had slipped down a smidge onto the windshield.  That's the other thing about a PT.  Their tops curve quite smoothly and gently downward into the windshield.  It's kinda cool-looking but not exactly practical in snowy weather.  Shoulda taken that off with my ice scraper, I suppose, I thought to myself.  Set on just getting home now, and really not that far away, I decided to go and sweep it off when I got there.

It was now 3:30 and traffic looked pretty normal coming out of the KMart parking lot.  Cars were lined up to turn left onto Tualatin-Sherwood clear through the 4-way stops in the parking lot.  I took a longish way around to the light so that I could just slide up to the tail end of the line instead of attempt to turn into it halfway, which never works and mainly just bugs people.

The light makes me nervous, though.  It's not a protected left turn light and sometimes you don't get through the intersection before it turns yellow again, especially if lots of people are coming on  straight.  

But this time most people across the intersection were turning right to get to the turning lanes for I-5 to Portland or Salem.  Lots of backed-up traffic once more.  Unusually backed-up, actually... I wondered what the deal was.  Just rush hour in the snow?

Everybody in my left-turn lane glided right through the light seemingly without regard for anybody who might be wanting to come straight, so I followed suit.  I don't think there were any people coming straight anyway.

The light turned yellow as I went through, as it always seems to.  I continued gliding through the intersection, and people behind me followed.  Traffic rules seem to be generally bent in crazy weather.

When I got into my lane I realized why traffic was so backed up.  There were two trucks stuck in the Portland freeway-entrance-only lanes.  I could see black snow dug up under their spinning wheels.

In a moment of horror, I wondered if they were perhaps blocking my way home.  I turned my eyes ahead of me and saw cars squeezing past one of the trucks in the lane I take home.  I looked back to the truck and yes, there was enough space to get through.  Not much!!  But enough.

Following the cars ahead of me once more, I inched past the truck, praying again that he wouldn't suddenly start sliding uncontrollably backwards down the overpass and slam into me.  Have I mentioned trucks scare me to death?

Act 5

Having made it safely past the truck, I was now three lighted intersections from home.  Yay!!  My daring adventure was finally coming to an end!

I got through the first intersection with no problems, just a little sliding and nervousness as I wondered whether traffic was treating the two lanes at this point as one or two.  I took a chance on the latter and drove in the (indiscernible) left lane as usual.  The guy in the car beside me did likewise and I breathed a sigh of relief.  Navigating traffic seems like a lot of guesswork to me, snow or no snow, and I love guessing right.

I was going a little faster than the man on my righthand side and pulled ahead of him, knowing the lanes merged into one shortly.  The end was in sight.  Just two more lights and I'd be turning into my own parking lot again.  

SHLUMP!

Snow started careening down my windshield.

Oops!  Windshield wipers to get it off... Still doing okay...

SHLUMP!

Okay, continuing with the windshield wiper plan.  My visibility is still fine.

SHLUMP! SHLUMP!  SHLUMP!

Oh great.  There went my visibility.

Blinking right.  Hazard lights, just in case. Checking the mirror.  Hey, all right!  The guy's way behind me. Into the nearest parking lot.

Only concerned with parking so I could get the darn snow off my windshield, I pulled the wrong way into a very narrow parking lot, parking the wrong way across a few parking spaces.  I turned off my car and got right out with my ice scraper and pushed tons of snow off my windshield.  Every last bit of the snow that had once been on my roof was now on the hood of my car or the ground.  I made sure to get ALL the snow off my car, whether or not it seemed necessary; I had so had enough trouble with it for today!

I had to just laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation.  What a day it'd been so far.  What stupid things I'd done.

After assuring myself that ALL the snow was off my car, I was relieved to get back in and prepare to proceed safely the whole block-and-a-half left until home.

Now, how to get out of this one-way parking lot?

I decided, instead of reversing out and risking backing out into the intersection I'd entered by, I'd just try a three-point turn to get myself going in the right direction.  I had plenty of space.  Of course, with a PT, it's never a three-point turn, it's always more like an eight-point turn, if you're lucky.  Darn turning radius.

So I started.  Zhoop, zhoop... Zhoop, zhoop... Forward, backward, forward, backward.  

Oh great.  Traffic had come into the parking lot...from the right direction.

The first was just a little truck with a trailer of some sort hooked on.  I was out of his way and was glad to just sit and wait for him to leave until I could try getting out myself soon.

Oh, here came another car... Hm... Let's hope there aren't anymore.  Should I try to get in behind this truck, or wait until this car goes by?  I was here first, I ought to be able to get in front of that car... I'm almost out.  Zhoop, zhoop... zhoop...

Hm.  Now there was some guy walking out from the building.  I stopped, indecisive once more.  Continue trying to get out, or just wait?  The guy stopped as well and looked very nervously in between me and the other car.  I felt very embarrassed all of a sudden.

I honestly don't purposely try to endanger people.  Really.

I put my car in park, and tried to communicate nonverbally that he could go.  He looked back and forth, back and forth between us again, checking.  You going to stop?  You going to stop?  Okay, then.  He finally walked through the two of us.

Just me and the car and the truck again.  Why was the truck still there, for goodness' sake?  He should've gone forever ago.  It would've made things a lot easier for me and this other car...

Now I worried at the car across from me.  Was he going to let me in?  Please, please, please...

I blinked left real briefly, to show that I was going to try and move in.  I paused, and the truck suddenly pulled out, and I FINALLY slid into the place the truck had just left, in front of the other car.  Hallelujah!!  I was on my way home!

Epilogue

I manuevered my way slowly down the narrow parking lot to the light outside 7-11, where I usually exit this narrow parking lot if I'm going home.  It's easier to turn right there, where the lanes have already merged into one, than it is to turn smack dab into the merging lane and immediately try to merge.

I observed that today there was not a bus stuck right outside the entrance to my apartment complex, as there had been yesterday.  I turned in and pulled my car into a parking space--NOT the one I started out the day in!  I never wanted a repeat of this again.

The lot was really slanted where I parked and it scared me to death for a sec when I stopped my car and realized it.  Should I try to find a space at a more level spot?  Was my car going to slide into the one next to me?

I made myself stop panicking and decided to just observe the lot and see if there WERE any level parking spaces.  Stepping out and stepping back, I assured myself that, yeah, pretty much the whole parking lot was slanted, especially 'cause of the snow bunched up in places.  If the truck on my right was going to be okay, I should be okay.

I finally turned round and started the trek back to my apartment from the parking space I was in.  I'd taken about two steps when my legs suddenly went flying from under me and I landed hard on my side.

Ow.

This day was done with.

SNOW.

The weather has been crazy this week. We had snow on Sunday and around-freezing temperatures all week long, plus more snow every night, and unrelenting snow today. It's been snowing since 5:30 this morning, without stopping.

Tomorrow we're predicted to get freezing rain or snow or both. The schools in the area have been canceled every day this week, so teachers and students get an extra week of Christmas vacation.

It's quite beautiful, but very wearisome. I'm glad I don't live in Michigan or Canada. I would get really tired of the snow, really fast.

Steve and I drove around doing errands today and then spent a little bit of time at his work campus walking around and playing in the fluffy white. It's not wet enough to pack, so no snowball fights or snowmen, but I did have a fun time running around in it and making a footprint heart and a footprint snowflake. The ponds at his workplace are mostly frozen over. Everything is covered.

What do you like best about snow?

Stephen: I like how it changes the scenery, and I like the element of danger it adds to driving.
Stephanie: I like how it sparkles and makes everything white and fluffy-looking. I also like making snow angels and having snowball fights and sledding in it--basically doing everything fun in it.