Our "Adventurous" Trip Home

Well we continued to get a lot of snow on Sunday night into Monday morning. The kids awoke at the perfect time... just before Oma and Opa pulled out, so they were able to say their sad goodbyes to their grandparents. Dad and I had gotten the chains on my car the night before and I had packed most of the stuff up as well. So besides a couple of clean-up stuff, we were pretty much ready to roll. We had planned on stopping at the famous McCall Pancake House on our way out of town and enjoyed a delicious breakfast there before hitting the road. I'm not sure what time we actually got on the road, probably between 9-10. While driving out of town it seemed that I had a lot of resistance to accelarating and my back wheels seemed like sleds (which I told Mary about) as we were fishtailing all over the place. Not having much experience in this much snow and driving with chains I figured this was how it was going to be and it was going to be a slow go for a while. About five minutes out of town we did a complete 180 and somehow avoided the bank on the opposite side of the road (a miracle!). Since we were now facing back toward McCall I just went back toward McCall until I could find a place to turn around. We still had the same issues with regard to sliding around but just decided to stay under 30 MPH. A couple miles down the road with someone on my tail the car behind me started flashing their brights at me and waving. So I pulled off the road and she informed me that my "back wheels are locked, they aren't moving at all". I said thanks and then thought or said "How the heck does that happen and how the heck do you fix it?" I put the car in reverse and it seemed to fix the problem and someone else offered to follow us for a few miles. The problem seemed fixed and the handling on the road was SO much better!

We proceeded on our way and figured we'd just take it slow. The problem was that Mary and I had different definitions of slow. The speed limit was 65 and I figured I'd keep it around 50 - 55 unless it seemed dicey. We were cruising along for an hour or so and were getting to a point where the snow/ice on the road was melting and there were a lot of patchy spots with bare pavement. Anyway, about this time on a decent decline in the road one of the chains broke and made quite a racket. We slowed to a stop and turned around to see if we could go back and find the chain and see what was going on. It sounded pretty bad as we turned around and we were worried that we had a flat or something important mechanically had broken. Everything looked okay except that the chain had broken and had gotten stuck on the inside of the tire around the axle near the brake disc. The solution: we had to remove the tire to diagnose and hopefully fix the issue. This of course meant that we had to unpack the trunk to get to the tire, which resulted in some of our stuff being placed on the side of the road (yard sale anyone?) and some of the stuff in our seats in the car. Fortunately (actually a real blessing) this happened to be in one of the rare spots where there was a "chain-up area" and so there was actually some semblance of a shoulder and we weren't actually on the highway, like we would have been if this had happened almost anywhere else on the trip. However we were still on a decline and on a somewhat icy road, not ideal conditions for jacking up your car to remove a tire. We realized as we got set to remove the tire that we didn't have any kind of a wedge to stop the back tire and keep the car a little more secure. Rocks could not been identified amidst the deep snow banks on both sides of the road so a piece of metal from the mechanism that holds the tire in place in the trunk was used as a make-shift wedge with miscellaneous bins from our trunk to re-inforce it (like it would have actually stopped the car from rolling!). I removed the tire took off the chain that was caught between the disc brakes and the inside of the rim of the wheel. We put the tire back on and proceeded with one chain into Council, ID to buy a new set of chains. The trip home from there was much better as we were able to remove our other chain in Council (the chains that we purchased were just in case we needed them) and pretty much cruise home with decent or clear roads.

I still don't know why the chain came off, it could have been the speed (Mary's opinion) or that the chain wasn't tight enough, or that it just got jarred loose on one of the cement patches. Regardless, I'm just grateful that Mary didn't do an "I told you so" because she felt I was going too fast. She just kept her mouth shut, realizing I/we didn't need any criticism at this point and that we just needed to work together to solve the problem. I really appreciated that! I did ask her to take some pictures of the side-of-the-road-ice/snow-tire-removing-fiasco, but she somewhat politely declined. Needless to say, we were glad when we finally arrived home and were very grateful that we had purchased those Car DVD players before we moved here, what a lifesaver (read: Kid-Quieter). Fun times!