How did your Sunday end?
My looked something like this:
Sunday began with all the promise of a beautiful spring day. Leith took our supa-cool bugz for a bike ride in the river valley while I had an awesome massage!
Forgive the blurry pictures. We were driving….
Later that evening, I set out for the airport to pick my parents up. They’d been livin’ it up in Mexico for the past 2 weeks, and I’d been voted chauffeur for the night.
Let me preface this with a story:
In March 2008, I was bedridden with threatened preterm labour. My parents had booked their annual trip to Mexico before they even knew we were pregnant. I wasn’t supposed to be due until mid-to-late April anyway, so the whole premature birth thing kind of threw a wrench into their plans. I assured them to go on their trip and that I would hold it in until they got back on March 8.
Needless to say, I had the girls at 6:18 and 6:20am on March 8, around the time they were boarding the plane in Cancun 
But rather than getting back to Edmonton in a timely matter, their flight was delayed and they missed their connection in Seattle. They had to stay overnight in Seattle, take a connecting flight to Vancouver in the morning, and a 3rd flight to Edmonton in the afternoon. My sister picked them up at suppertime and promptly ran out of gas. Then her car broke down. My parents got to the hospital around 10pm on March 9, about 40 hours after the girls were born.
But rather than getting back to Edmonton in a timely matter, their flight was delayed and they missed their connection in Seattle. They had to stay overnight in Seattle, take a connecting flight to Vancouver in the morning, and a 3rd flight to Edmonton in the afternoon. My sister picked them up at suppertime and promptly ran out of gas. Then her car broke down. My parents got to the hospital around 10pm on March 9, about 40 hours after the girls were born.Suffice to say, I should have known…
Their flight was late arriving, but they got through customs quickly. We pulled up to their house just after 10:30pm, and my mom looked at me and asked, “Do you have a house key?” NO!! Why would I have your house key, Mom?? Well, normally I have a copy of their house key on my key chain, but I only grabbed my spare van key, since Leith was at home.
No house key.
As it turns out, she didn’t bring a key because my sister dropped them off, and my mom was tired of people making fun of her for being over-prepared
We called my sister, since she lives in the city and has a key to my parents’ house. No answer. We started off down the highway to my house to pick up my key to my parents’ house. Jocelyn called back. We detoured downtown. Halfway there, we got smacked with a snowstorm – one of those ridiculous spring blizzards that you only ever read about in Little House on the Prairie. Golf-ball sized snowflakes pelted my windshield and I could barely see. We got to J’s apartment and she tossed her key down to us from her 3rd floor balcony. We headed back to my parents.
Seriously, Mom. No key? This is soooooo not my fault…
The snow was light on the south side, so I decided to truck on back out to my house. It was already 11:20pm … I had to be up early to drop the bugz off at their sitter and go in to the office. Bad idea…
Long story short, I was stranded before I made it past Highway 60. I literally had to turn my headlights off to see in front of my van. I was the only vehicle heading west on a major highway, and I couldn’t keep it in a straight line. I was barely plugging away at 50km/h. I nearly hit the ditch on either side of my 3 lanes to choose from several times. I could hardly breathe. There was no rhyme or reason to compare to the disorientation I was feeling. My adrenaline was surging, and my panic was mounting. I was concentrating so hard on the task at hand that I could barely keep a prayer in my head.
Somehow, I managed to hit the off-ramp for Acheson. I flipped my headlights off so that I was able to see just enough to get around the ramp and onto Highway 60. I have never been so happy to see that Husky sign in my entire life.
I decided to pull over, grab a coffee and wait it out for awhile.
Another side note:
In the years I ran my dance studio out in Thorsby, I made many a treacherous trip back to Edmonton when I would have been wise to stay at my parents’ house. One night, I was caught in a similar blizzard and only made it as far as Leduc by the grace of God, rumble strips and knowing Highway 39 like the back of my hand. The 25-minute drive took me nearly 90 minutes in second gear. I holed up at the Tim Horton’s for 45 minutes or so to regain my composure, and made it back to Edmonton without further incident. Last night made this story look like a walk in a butterfly-and-fairy-filled park.
I sat in the parking lot of the Husky gas station, sipping lukewarm, decaf truck-stop coffee and eating a Super Jo Louis (really, Meaghan? Gross…). After an hour and a half of the snow and ice getting worse, my mom and Leith convinced me to get a hotel room for the night. So, at 1am, I gave up and crawled into bed at the Nova Inn for a restless 5-hour snooze. The desk clerk even took pity on my poor rattled soul and gave me the truckers’ rate for my room. I was up at 6am, showered and on the road before 6:30am. The roads were plowed but still horrible. I made it home just after 7am.
Thus, I am staying home today. Screw you, March.
Although I will admit that the rooms were very nice, the rates were very cheap, and there was something thrilling about getting to stay in a hotel room all by myself on a whim like that
