Shake-a shake-a shake-a… Shake-a shake-a shake-a…
I do not like Ice Driving. Yes, I am a yooper, albeit one who has lived in southeast troll-land since the Jurassic Age. I still don’t like Ice Driving. I do not like Ice Riding either. I am a White Knuckle Ice Rider. My knuckles were white for somewhere around three hours today as we joined all the other Weekend Warriors traveling down the I75 SUV Speedway. The GG did the driving. I sat in the passenger seat and drove my iPhone, flipping nervously between email, Twitter, Facebook, Angry Birds, the NYT xword, solitaire, the weather, and Google maps.
I drove the GG nuts with questions. Is it slippery here? Was that the wind or did we slide a little? The Frog Hopper is pretty good in bad conditions and has new tires but you can feel the wind in that vee-hickle. The road surface varied wildly and it was almost impossible to tell whether the pavement was wet, dry, dry with blowing snow, or a sheet of ice. US23 was particularly awful and got exponentially worse as we began our orbit of The Planet Ann Arbor. Maybe I should rename it Ice Road Asteroid?
Anyway, the GG paid me back bigtime for all of my skittishness. Shake-a shake-a shake-a. There was a half bottle of Blue Death in the driver’s side door pocket. It was frozen. He wanted it to thaw out so he could drink it. I don’t drink Blue Death unless I am desperately thirsty and it’s the only thing available. Anyway. It got partially thawed out and then he started shaking it to speed up the thawing process. Shake-a shake-a shake-a. Shake-a shake-a shake-a. This went on intermittently for around an hour. It was like the Chinese Water Torture. I wanted to complain but I held my tongue. I think… I may have complained once even though I knew it was futile. The GG does not get nervous about Ice Driving but I knew that he had to focus and my skittishness and passenger seat driving had already interfered with that. I tried hard to just shaddup. Not easy…
In the end, our trip home did not take all that much longer than usual. Actually it was probably faster than some of our summer trips when the traffic gets totally hosed and there are hours-long backups. Like when they close the Zilwaukee Bridge and don’t tell anybody. Google maps showed accidents and slowdowns but they did not cause backups and I finally figured out that the slowdowns were because people were actually traveling S-L-O-W-L-Y. I still felt great relief when we exited onto North Maple.
January 26th, 2014 at 9:27 pm
You sound JUST like me(I am terrified of the ice, beyond rational) and my late husband was just like the GG. Patt used to “play with me” sometimes which I didn’t really appreciate and let him know in very definite terms. 🙂 What is the Blue Death?? (feeling stupid because I can’t figure that out)