Well it finally happened...

I drove my car into a ditch and got it stuck in the snow....

I must admit that I have been scared of doing this every time my car slipped a little on the ice. But up until now, I had been successful in avoiding doing that. So I suppose I was overdue. Here's how it went.

It was getting late on in the afternoon and I decided to head over to my future in-laws house for dinner and general hanging out. The day before it had been hovering right above freezing and had rained off and on all day. Since then, the temperature had dropped by roughly ten degrees. (Oh the other thing to remember is that I had ran out of windshield wiper fluid and the rain had made dirt run all over my windshield, I had forgotten about this). I came outside and started my car. It was a little hard to see through the windshield because of being dirty and a little bit frosty. But since my in-laws only lived five minutes away, I didn't think anything of it. I didn't wait for my car to heat up, there by defrosting, I simply drove off. And what a foolish mistake that was. I had gotten halfway down the road when my windshield fogged up, and I lost the visibility I had left. I didn't want to drive into the ditch, so I drove closer to the center of the road (since I didn't want to stop in the middle of the road... looking back, that would have been smarter.) I wound up instead in the ditch on the other side of the road, missing someones driveway by two feet.

I'll sum up what happened next rather quickly. I called my brother-in-law. He came, shovel in hand, and spent the next 45 minutes to an hour digging out the snow from under it. But we still could not get it unstuck. Then another neighbor stopped, and said that he knew someone with a winch on his truck that could come help us pull the car out. We went over to his house to wait for winch man. 45 minutes later, Winch Man showed up. I knew then that I would be no help, so I walked back to my brother-in-laws truck to wait out of the cold. On my way there, I slipped on the ice and bruised my knee and hurt my hand. Stupid Ice. They winched it first from the back, and then pulled it clean free in the front. So twoish hours after I foolishly slipped into ditch, I was free.

All I can say is, from now on, I'll be careful to have a clean windshield, wait for my car to heat up, and remember that icy roads are slippery. That's another Alaskan initiation down.

P.s. that's not my car, but that's kind of what my car looked like stuck in the ditch.

Ice Ice Baby

Some times, in Alaska, when the temperature drops low enough (say under 20 degrees F) a kind of frost forms all over your car. From what I can tell, there is no moisture in the air that first clings to the windows and then turns to ice. It simply develops. Very strange and very annoying.

Today I had to drop off some late time sheets at work, and as usual I was running late. The office would be closing in twenty minutes and I was supposed to be meeting my future sister-in-law at Fred Meyer. So I gathered everything up, swept my damp hair up into a bun, and ran out the door. And much to my chagrin I find that my windshield, back window, and drivers side window are completely covered in this dumb frost stuff. Now normally I would start my car, take three minutes and scrape it all off so that I can see where I am going. However, when my fiance was in town (he normally lives nine hours north), he was using the car and took out my ice scraper and left it in his parents garage. I've been meaning to stop by and pick it up, but I keep forgetting. So here I am, needing to get over to the office, which means I don't have time to scrape the windshield with a credit card. (Which is apparently a great trick in 30 below weather when the INSIDE of your windows get frosted over.) So what I do is this... I start my car, and back out of the driveway. Then I shift into first, turn on my defroster as high as I can, and lean over in a hunched position. This way I can see out of the tiny line at the bottom where there isn't any frost.

I drive like this all the way over to the office. Which is really only five minutes away, but if you have ever driven in alaska in the winter, five minutes can be a dangerous thing. First off, the more rural roads are white because they are covered in compacted snow and ice which blends well with the frost covering your windows. Second, there are crazy trucks who think they are invincible and snowmachiners doing crazy things on the side of the road. And third, a moose may decide to cross the road in front of you and if you are focusing too much on not accidentally driving into the other lane of traffic (and/or the ditch) because you can't really see through the windshield... it might be hard to spot them.

By the time I got to the office, my car had heated up enough that half of my windshield was defrosted. I ran in, took care of my stuff, came back out all ready to head to Freddies when I remembered something. I needed to pick up the disk with the pictures I needed to print out at freddies on it. The disk was at my fiance's parents house. So I leap in my car, finally able to sit up properly and see, drive over to his parents, race inside, grab the disk, jump back into my car, zoom down the road toward the store, get half way there and remember.... CRAP!!! The ice scrapper!!! So lets hope there isn't any frost on my windshield in the morning. I don't want to have to deal with that crap before I go to work.

Why I Started This Blog

You may be wondering, why is a girl who didn't see snow until she was 12 living in Alaska? At least, you might be if you knew that I didn't see snow until I was 12. I grew up in Southern California, in a town that, according to Wikipedia, has 300 sunny days a year. As a kid, I believed anything below 70 was cold, and at 60 I would pull out the parka. But this past May I moved up to Alaska in an attempt to grow up a little before I married my own Alaskan man. Before this winter I didn't know what snow tires were. I didn't know what a block heater was. I didn't know about starting your car half an hour before you leave. I didn't know how to drive in snow. This blog is about me learning how to survive in Alaska. The Goal: To completely assimilate into Alaskan society so that no one believes I lived most of my life in Southern California. We'll see how it goes.