Did anybody see my icy picture of the Center Twp Library on WNDU Channel 16 News Friday night? I had emailed it to their "Weather in Your Backyard" site and while I was on the phone with my sister at 5:30, there it was on TV with my name to credit. I was so excited and thought I'd get a call or email from someone who saw it on TV. Was absolutely no one watching? How sad.
Anyway, we did break free from our icy wonderland. But as we drove 13 hours to get to Andover, Kansas, we drove through one equally wintery scence after another. No state between Indiana and Kansas was untouched by snow and ice. It was beautiful, but caused problems for other travelers on our path. This was especially true on a particular 20-mile stretch of I-80 in Iowa. At that point we had just eaten lunch at Subway and were moving with traffic between 5 and 30 miles an hour as we watched drivers and passengers climb up from their cars in the gulley in the median between east and west-bound traffic or from off the right shoulder. No one ever appeared injured. And every time, it was a single-car slide off. Despite their misfortune, lost time, and expense, I believe every one of them are saying "Thank God!" and meaning it. They were safe.
On another separate note... If you've ever been on a long road trip with another person, you'll empathize when I say -- The smell of each other can become too much. When I was a kid, my family took lots of vacations and always by car or van. And the worst offender of bodily function was always my dad. I know it had something to do with the pathetic mix of foods we were eating along the way, but it didn't matter. The effects were toxic. The lingering stench was unbearable. And with freezing temperatures outside, we couldn't let the windows down. We were stuck with it... time after time.
Our generally uneventful trip yesterday began to remind me of those family vacations as a kid. It wasn't the same noxious fumes, nor produced in the same way. But somewhere in Iowa I smelled a horrific unidentifiable smell and quietly asked Ben, "Did you burp?" He admitted he had with a simple, "Sorry." I was disgusted, and my face curled up to show it. "What did you eat?" I asked.
His sad response: "It could be almost anything." And he began to list an appalling combination of road foods he had put into his body to that point....
"A sausage and egg McGriddle, hashbrowns, 2 coffees, pork rinds, rice crispie treats, skittles, a tuna salad sub sandwich, Dr. Pepper, Cheetos, harvest grain and salsa Sunchips, A&W root beer, Tic Tacs, a Hershey chocolate bar with almonds, dried apple chips, corn nuts."
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