Since David and I were married, everytime a vehicle had an accident or was damaged, it was because of dear hubby.  I won't go into the long list (but it is looooong!) so as not to completely bash my poor husband.  But it has almost been a point of bragging rights for me that I had never damaged our cars.

Until yesterday.

We were coming home from church and decided to cut through Norwalk so we could dumpster dive at the Fareway.  Dumpster diving was a good decision as we got TONS of great produce -  tons of cucumber, oranges, grapes and apples, potatoes, brocolli, green onions, and several shrink wrapped packages of peppers and onions already cut up and just begging to be made into fajitas.

Anyway, we decided to cut through the back roads to come home.  The paved roads weren't bad at all.  Then we turned on the dirt road to head to our little piece of countryside.  It was so beautiful - snow packed roads, snow falling, driving through the woods - it always makes me think of that song:

"Over the river and thru the wood,
To grandfather's house we go;
The horse knows the way
To carry the sleigh,
Thru the white and drifted snow, oh!"

The road ends at a T where you can go right to the Banner shooting range, or left, over a little bridge, and the road continues.  I put on the brakes extra early since everyone knows that driving in snow isn't a problem - it's stopping in snow that is a problem.  Well, the brakes immediately went into their anti-lock vibrations, which I HATE!  David insists that it would be worse without them, but you might as well just be sliding because you still can't stop the car with anti-lock brakes.  I tried pumping them, but there was just no traction.

We lucked out that there has been so much snow that has not melted and more snow on top of that because instead of running off the road and into the creek, we plowed into, and half on top of, a big snowbank.  I did take out the sign that told how much weight the bridge supported.

We also were lucky that the Banner shooting range was right there.  A car came down and picked up David and brought him down to find someone with a 4 wheel drive.  Then the 4 wheel drive came down and brought me and the girls to the main building so we could be warm while they located a tow strap and got the van pulled off the embankment.  The guys at the shooting range were so nice.  They gave all sorts of goodies to the girls while we waited - a camouflage drink holder, a Dept. of Natural Resources water bottle, and a duck call.  What more could you ask for?!

Anyway, apparently we were the third vehicle that morning to plow into the embankment at the end of the road.  When we drove out we could see where the other cars had ended up.  That made me feel a little better about crashing the van.  Also the fact that the car is okay.  There is a only a little place on the bottom side of the bumper that got bent as the van was yanked off the embankment.

I had David drive the rest of the way home after that little adventure onto the snowbank.  To further make me feel better, when we came to the first turn we could make to go home, David wasn't able to get the car slowed down in time to make the turn.  So we went straight, veeeerrrry sloooooowly to the next turn and made that one.  But if David had been faced with the end of a road like I had been, we would have been in the ditch again!

Posted in: dumpster diving, snow on Monday, February 8, 2010 at at 8:42 AM