10001110100110101
I guess I should talk about my drive now. It's amazing how much can happen in four hours. I headed out of the university at a virtual crawl. I was not used to the snow yet, and it didn't seem as if anyone else around me was either. I had heard on the news that there was a crash on the westbound lanes of the 401 near Guelph, so I spent a few minutes thinking of a way to get around the problem area when I realized: "Waitaminute, I'm going east!". How silly of me.
Traffic was slow all the way out to the 401. The average speed was around 50 kph on the highway, and I couldn't believe how long it was going to take to make it back home at that speed (roughtly three hours). Hitting the 401, there was much less traffic, and I was free to drive a bit faster to make up for lost time. Still, going at 80 kph seemed fast because of the weather. I wanted to make it back home quickly because I was starting to fall asleep. I had to fight with myself to stay awake during the hour of boredom when I was struck by a moment of terror. I had glanced down at my instrument board and I saw that the tachometer was showing that the engine was running at 6000 rpm. That got my attention. I was suddenly wide awake, and wondering how much damage I was doing to the engine. I quickly eased off the gas, turned off the radio, turned down the fan, and listened to the engine. *listens*
Funny, the engine sounds fine. I gave the engine a little more gas. Hmm, it still sounds normal. A bit more, and the tachometer spiked. The engine, however, did not. I listened for a fair number of minutes before concluding that the problem was not with the engine, but with the tachometer. Whew, serious problem, not!
During that lapse in my "let's make up time" stage, I realized that there were a lot of flashing lights up ahead (not including the police car that had passed me). On closer inspection of the trucks ahead, I realized that they were snow plows. There were four of them. For some reason, these four snow plows just happened to meet up together at this moment and began to plow the snow off the highway. This is good and all, but why did they have to do it right in front of me? (There were only two cars ahead of me, and that included the police cruiser.) We were in the Milton area, and the only thing I could do for the next little while was coast while the plows ahead of us did their work at 30 kph. (And I had thought that going at 50 kph at the beginning of this journey was slow!)
This went on for quite some time. There were no breaks on the ranks of the snow plows. They were locked tight, and even a motorcyclist would've had trouble squeaking by them. I felt sorry for those cars that got on the highway just behind them, but after a little pondering, I realized how difficult it was to drive on the three inch deep snow in front of them and changed my opinion. One of the trucks in the front group with me thought otherwise. (I had thought of this, but decided against it.) When we approached the last service station before entering the city, this guy took the exit, burned through the service station, and despite getting detoured, was able to make it out in front of the snow plow convoy. It must've been nice to be driving an SUV too.
As we approached highway 407, I was half hoping that the line of plows would break, giving us an opportunity to make a break for it. No such luck, although the police cruiser that was heading our pack took the off ramp and split, along with a number of other cars. Me, being the cheapskate that I was, stuck with the plows and continued along the 401. It was just after that off-ramp, before we went under the highway, when the plows stopped. All of them.
I couldn't see what was ahead of them so I couldn't figure out the reason for halting. There had been cars in the way before, but all they did was plow around them. We sat there for a good five minutes. I took that time to turn my radio back on to see what was going on. I should've gotten my notebook out to take more notes.
I didn't see an opening until after we had passed highway 410, when the collector lanes branched off the main highway. The plows in front of us began to veer to the right, and I noticed that the highway was plowed recently. Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light. My head gre heav.. wait. Sorry, I was just about to break into song there. But anyway, up ahead in the distance, I saw that there were more snow plows that were plowing the road in front of us. These plows, however, stayed on the core lanes, while the plows we were stuck behind seemed to be heading off to the collector lanes. I (and a few others) took this opportunity to squeeze by the leftmost snowplow and make a break for it through the collector lanes.
There was very little traffic in front of us to slow us down, but boy, was there a lot of snow. Because of the lack of cars, I was tempted to try some slides, but considering the condition of the car, I'm glad I didn't. I was able to burn through that stretch of the highway very quickly, until we approached the border when intercity traffic began to build up. (It was already deep into the afternoon rush.) The short lived euphoria of moving quickly dissapeared when I saw the traffic chaos in front of me. I decided at that time to take a little detour, heading north on the 427 to take 409 and then get back on the 401, but those plans were dashed when I saw the huge backlog of vehicles trying to go north on the 427. I went on Renforth drive instead. Oh boy, that was also a chore. There was quite a bit of traffic on that road, and after realizing that I didn't have a city road map in the car, and that my knowledge of that area was very limited, I found the earliest exit back onto the highway. This fortunately put me past the main part of the bottleneck, but still put me smack in the middle of the traffic jam.
Once I had snuggled myself back into the flow of traffic (at all of 15 kph) I noticed that the oil pressure gauge was a little high. To me, I consider off the scale to be high. This baby was WAY off the scale. This too was a little worrisome. It could also be an instrument problem as with the tachometer, although I don't have any easy way to gauge what the oil pressure is without opening up the engine. While we were crawling along the highway, I tested out how badly the needle would jump, and I realized that once the level passed the halfway mark, the pressure went through the roof (which also coencided with an rpm of around 2000). It lead me to believe that it was another measuring goof, but to be safe, I kept the rpms (and oil pressure) down.
Being behind the snow plows outside of the city was bad, but being behind miles of traffic inside of the city was worse! The average speed I was getting was around 15 kph. Much slower than even the darned plowers. Because I was going so slow, the snow that struck my windshield tended to stick, which meant that I had to keep the wipers on constantly. I turned down the heat because it was getting unbearibly hot in the car, and ice started forming on my windsheild wipers, making them a little less efficient at keeping my windshield clean. The unwiped snow then blocked my field of vision, making me drive even slower. Worse than that, I noticed that my engine started to overheat due to the stop and crawl conditions. I turned the heat back on and rolled down the window. Every ten minutes or so, I had to keep smacking the windshield wipers with my hand to dislodge some of the ice building up on them. This cleared up my vision for a little while, but only for a little while. This continued on for another two hours. Because I left the heat on, I left the window down, which meant that sometimes, some of the ice that had been building up on the side of the windshield would tumble down my window. Most would stay out of the car, but..
If it was just the traffic, I wouldn't be too annoyed. If it was the traffic and weather, well.. that can be handled. But throw a clunky car (which could probably break down at any time) into the mix.. At least that kept me up. No problems with falling asleep!
At least I'm still in one piece. It was a drive that I needed to take, and experience I needed to recieve, but boy, I really don't want to do that again. Now, I think I need some sleep. *yawn*
