Family Holiday and Birthdays

It's been quite the week.  Both Allie and Justin were supposed to join us at the house for Christmas.  But the weather and Frontier Airlines presented some challenges.

On Thursday night, Allie was scheduled to fly from San Francisco to Vegas to Chicago on Frontier Airlines.  Due to the blizzard conditions, a/k/a the cyclone bomb, Allie's departing plane never arrived in San Francisco.  The flight was delayed from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m and eventually, both the Vegas flight and the Chicago flight were cancelled.  

My dear daughter, not easily deterred, demanded a refund and immediately re-booked a non-stop flight to Chicago on American Airlines, scheduled to arrive only an hour after her original flight.  She boarded at 5 a.m. and arrived in Chicago at 11 a.m.

Meanwhile, in the Midwest, we were all warned to stay off the roads, due to life-threatening conditions.  There ended up being a lot less snow than predicted, but it was still -10 F with 45 mph gusts when I left the house.  Wind chills were below -40 F.  Except for a semi-truck being blown partially into my lane while I was alongside, the trip down was uneventful.  On the way back, the roads were icing up.  Many vehicles were in the ditch.  Semi-trucks stopped running on the side of the road, as diesel became semi-solid in the cold.

We stopped in Madison to say hi to Justin at his apartment and then headed for home.  Justin's caregivers were off work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so I would be returning the next day.

The trip to get Allie was in my comfortable, high clearance, four-wheel drive Nissan Frontier.  To get Justin, we needed to dig the front-wheel drive wheelchair van out of the snow.  Then I plowed the long shared driveway on the hill without the help of the neighbors who fled to their own family Christmas in northern Minnesota. Julia scraped our short, steep driveway so that I would have a better chance of making the last 90 degree turn with the van.  

On the way to Madison, the van developed a violent vibration at anything over 50 mph.  I was going to turn around, but Julia strongly suggested that I continue but drive slow.    Just past the I-39/151 exit, I saw a red pickup truck that slid off into a deep snowbank and somehow caught fire.  There wasn't anybody in the cab when I drove by, but the front of the vehicle was ablaze, and a cloud of dark smoke drifted across the road, stinking of burning tires.

I loaded up Justin at his apartment and headed back home.  The fire department was still at the scene of the accident, and the pickup truck looked black all over with broken windows.  We saw many more vehicles in the ditch north of Madison.

Eventually, Justin and I made it to our road.  Even though we had prepared the driveway adequately, the county had not plowed our public road on that day.  I tried to make it up the road, but there was just too much drifted snow from the high winds, so I needed to retreat backwards. The only way that I was going to get up was to plow the public road myself.  

I called Julia who walked down to the van. She sat with Justin, keeping the engine and heat running.  Then I walked home and retrieved my atv/plow.  It didn't take too long to clear the public road so that I could get the proper running start at our driveway with the van.

Justin and I have made this adventurous run up the driveway many times, but it's been at least a year.  I have one rule:  he must stay silent.  I hit the road at 40 and kept enough momentum to make it to the driveway at 30.  From there, it's a slow curve that we slide through to maintain enough momentum up the long shared driveway and then the 90 degree turn up our short private driveway.  We made it!  The family was all there.

Allie, Justin, Julia and her brother Scott

Julia is a Christmas baby.  I didn't bake her a cake, but I did assemble an ice cream cake for her.  My birthday is next month.  My wish list:  a lifetime Senior National Parks Pass.

The mechanical problem with the van must have been related to the extreme cold.  A day later, when I returned Justin to his apartment, the vibration mysteriously resolved.