Afternoon all. I've been busy, but I'm back.
So, overview of my week.
My grandmother has been up, so we've been doing things. Traveling to the city for chow, cruising the highways through the county, and looking for rocks (Grandma is a rock hound. So am I, if you count gold as a rock.
).
Temperature has been down around 15 degrees at night, so there has been some ice and sn*w most days of the week, but it melts off by noon.
We had some of the white stuff on Friday. I had the day off from work, but nobody told me, so I showed up at work at 6:30 to find an empty office. So I went out and played in the sn*w. Helped a traveler chain up going over one of the summits. Why he decide to hook a 1/2 ton 2wd truck to a 30 foot trailer and then drive over an icy mountain at 6:45 am is beyond me, but he made it. Barely.
A while later I went out to work on a video for YouTube in a place I go to frequently in my truck. But, I was in my mom's 2010 Explorer, just to see how it would do. The video was a fail (got lucky with that one, though. A 60 foot tall pine tree fell on the 'stage' I was using while I was off gathering more supplies from the forest.), so I headed back.
As I was driving back down the road, I came across a patch of ice. I was in second gear, going about 10 mph but the car broke traction. I tapped the brakes like I would in my truck, but with the ABS system, I didn't get much more than a light on the dash. By then, I was off of the ice and back in 1 inch of sn*w over good gravel. So I tried to lock the brakes and get traction from the gravel, like I would do in my truck. But, the ABS and traction control said no. The driver side of the car slowed down, while the passenger side hit the go juice and tossed me into a spin...and off the side of the road.
No major damage to the car: just a cracked plastic bumper and little dent in the hood that I fixed. Had to use my truck to pull the car out, but that worked and everyone is happy. I don't think I'll ever live it down, though my dad did almost the same thing on the way back home.
--TK