Last week, my wife received a call from one of her cousin’s in the St. Louis area that their mother had passed away. Even though we had made it a point to visit her on our trip back east last fall, we both felt like we should attend the funeral. So, I started planning the trip
“Hey, maybe we could to attend the Chiefs final regular season game at Arrowhead Stadium since we are going to be back in the Kansas City area.”
“OK…scratch that. They are playing the Broncos in Denver.”
But as I was working on that idea, I checked to see what the weather would be like. After all, attending their final game in Kansas City would be cool, BUT there is a big difference between something being “cool’, and ‘ “Wow, this is really COLD!”
No matter which route I checked, snow was projected to start falling on Sunday afternoon. So the plan changed to just attending the funeral on Friday and then getting back home ASAP.
We drove Thursday, attended the funeral on Friday, and immediately started our trek back to Colorado.
The last time we passed through Kansas City, my plans to bless my wife were foiled. So I was bound and determined to revisit the scene of the crime. So we had dinner at one of our favorite restaurants in KC, Jack Stack. It was delicious!!!
I had originally planned to book a hotel nearby, and start out first thing in the morning. But after dinner, Bunch suggested that we drive a few more hours to get ahead of tomorrow’s storm.
Great idea!
So drove two more hours, and found a great old hotel in Manhattan, KS. The next morning, after a great night’s sleep, ate a good breakfast, and headed out.
The weather app seemed to indicate that we might be able to avoid the storm if we headed further north. I decided to take the state highways instead of the I-70…and besides, it’s just more interesting to me.
For about two hours, things were going great. But as we drove through Clay Center,KS, things started changing. Even though I had the front defroster blowing hot air at full force, and was repeatedly spraying -30º de-icing windshield washer fluid, ice kept slowly but continuously building up on the windshield.
I got an idea to put the front sun visors down to trap the warm air against the windshield…No real change.
We were coming into Beloit, KS (which I had never heard of before), so I decided that I would stop, fill up the gas tank and scrape the windshield.
About a half mile before we got into town, the car started feeling a little weird. I can’t really describe it, but it felt like we were floating…then a quick, slight wiggle.
I paused…We coasted a bit. Whatever it was gone. So, I cautiously continued on.
Bunch suggested, “Maybe we should get a hotel.”
I thought, “What!?!?!?”, but I said, “Well, first let’s see if they even have one.”
We looked for a gas station…nothing to see here.
I turned to resume “making progress”, and, amazingly, all of the ice on the windshield was gone! I theorized that the ice was building up because we must have been driving in a cold area, and that the temperature was warmer where we currently were.
Anyway, no gas stations. No hotel either!
“Sorry, hon…but we have to keep going.”
We were driving 25-30 MPH in 2nd gear. Seeing a hill immediately ahead, I slowly started accelerating. Then I shifted the car into drive, and with that one little ‘click’, all of our plans began to change.
The floating was back. The car wiggled…then started sliding to the left.
I took my foot off the gas pedal and gently steered into it. It immediately got worse. It looked like we were going to slide front first off the opposite side of the road!
So I tried to gently correct. Suddenly, the back of the car broke completely loose. The tail end whipped around in a counter clockwise direction. It was very clear that there was nothing I could do to, so I announced, “Here we go!”
The car spun about 345º and quite emphatically hurtled us off the our original side of the road. Down the 4-5 foot slope we went.
I whispered a quick prayer as we headed up the slope where the barbed wire fence marking the beginning of the pasture was now appearing in my rear view mirror..
We stopped a few feet short of the fence.
“Wow! That was close…Thank you, Lord.”
We took a few moments to regain our composure.
I restarted the car.
“Well, that was wild. But, no harm, no foul.”
I figured it would be foolish to drive back up onto the road that we had just skated off, so I started to drive on the flat section between the two grassy slopes up to the dirt road that joined the road we were on.
Thud…thud…thud…
“What is that?”
I got out of the car.
“Wow…this is not good…”
The rear driver’s side tire had popped off the rim. So the rim had then plowed down the first slope sideways through the wet dirt and grass, and, in the process, collected a pretty impressive amount of evidence of what had just happened.
“Looks like we are going to be delayed for a few hours…OK.”
I figured there was no way to jack up the car to get the tire fixed while the dirt slope was getting softer by the minute. So I pulled the mess out of the rim, got back in the car, and proceeded to slowly creep up the grassy “valley” to the dirt road.
As we sat on the side of the road, we saw a few other vehicles slowly (I mean, 5, maybe 10 MPH) creep up the hill.
“How are they able to do that? I have good quality snow tires.”
Within a few minutes, a black SUV with ‘Sheriff’ written on the side pulled up. A young woman got out and asked for my driver’s license.
“Oh, come on. We didn’t do anything…”
“Why do you need this?”
“I just need to call it in so Dispatch knows where I am and what I am working on.”
She and I talked outside in the cold for about 10 minutes. As the ice on my windshield and the fact that our car had just done a beautiful pirouette off the road had proven, it was not just cold…it was COLD!!! And the wind was making it feel even colder! And SHE was in short sleeves.
It was so cold that I never got around to thinking I should turn my ‘Man Card’ over to her.
Meanwhile, inside our warm car, Bunch was on the phone with AAA. A man in a white pick up truck successfully drove down that hill and then turned onto the dirt road to check on us. I told him we were on the phone with AAA. Then I asked how he was able to drive on that road.
“Oh, I’ve got 4 wheel drive turned on.”
“That answers that question.”
I not only don’t have 4 wheel drive, I have rear wheel drive! Short of having a different car, I didn’t stand a chance. There was nothing I could have done.
The white pickup man left. The sheriff (Did I mention that she was young…and a female…!!!) determined that we were going to be OK, and took off.
As soon as they left, AAA called Bunch back. She said she had spent the last 15 minutes calling at least five towing companies in the nearby towns (20-50 miles), and none of them would even pick up the phone!
We sat in the car and watched a pickup truck slowly drove by us and head up the hill. Suddenly, his truck wiggled…and then he pretty much duplicated exactly what happened to us…except his truck came to a stop just before sliding off a far steeper and deeper slope. I don’t know if he was praying, but I sure was praying for him!
No sooner had that in person drama concluded, another man in another white pickup truck pulled up and offered to help. I hopped back out of the car and told him our story. He said he would take me into town to see if either of the two tire stores were open.
I politely declined…I mean, I don’t know him from Adam! And I wasn’t going to leave my wife alone on the side of the road in a town we had never heard of.
He gave me his business card, and said that he would go check and call me back. We swapped phone numbers.
A few minutes later he called back to informed me that the tire stores were closed. In fact, pretty much the entire town was closed. I asked him if I could call him on Monday morning. He said yes.
It was now around 1:00 PM on a Saturday (read it like the Billy Joel song, “Piano Man”). The tire store, which, according to their voice mail message, was supposed to be open, was closed. Even if they were open, we had no way to get the car there because the AAA tow trucks weren’t answering their phones!!! And I knew there was no chance they were going to open on Sunday out here in the God fearing Midwest.
As our predicament was slowly coming into clear focus, a second (young) female sheriff pulled up. We updated her with the latest news. We then threw what we needed into the back of her SUV, and she drove us to the only hotel in town.
Soooo…it looks like we are going to be “vacationing” at the Super 8 in Beloit, KS for the weekend!
