We were going to go to lunch today with friends and see the new house that they are in the process of building.  I was a little bit nervous about it when I saw we’d gotten a few inches of snow, and it’s still really cold, but we have a four-wheel drive car, so I relaxed a little.  As we were going out to the car, Rich mentioned that the four-wheel drive’s battery was dead, so we were going to take my car.  Great ride, but terrible in winter.  I was trying for my brave face, until we got on the road, and he said one of the tires was low and we needed to stop and put air in it.  That meant I was now on high-alert, because the roads were bad, it was freezing, we didn’t have the right car for the circumstances, and our tire was low.  We went to a convenience store, and while he was getting air in the tire, I was getting food and drink (even though we were going to lunch), in case we had issues on the highway.  The ride should normally take about an hour, but once we got on the highway, it got worse.  There were cars in the ditch, there were cars that had just had accidents and the police were just pulling up and the final straw, was a car in the passing lane that lost control and was swerving all over the road.  Luckily, the person must have known a little bit about driving on ice, as they didn’t put their foot on the brake….and eventually regained control.  By then Rich had decided we were going to turn around and I could not have been more relieved.  He asked me to put the hazard lights on, so other cars would slow down or avoid us, and found our way off of the major highway to take a two-lane road back home.

I’ve never been fond of driving in bad weather, but today was a combination of conditions that we should have known not to try to navigate..  We were only twenty miles from home, but the ride back seemed to take forever.  Rich was producing so much adrenalin from the near misses, that his mouth was dry and his hands were shaky.

We stopped at a grocery store, got some treats for ourselves and the dogs, and came home.  So date night begins, with us snug in our house, the heat cranked to high, a pizza and two movies to watch, and the dogs ready to rule the roost.  It just doesn’t get any better than that.

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