Just another weekend in the mountain...
This weekend none of the other cabin tenants traveled up to Tahoe... meaning: Marta and I were off to a romantic weekend!... but life isn't easy and as we'd say in the triathlon practices "no pain, no gain"...
Anyways, this was definitely a romantic weekend, but at a cost. Check it out:
Friday night - We run into a snow storm at the bottom of the mountain... drove about 50 miles with snow chains... one of them was nevertheless damaged from the previous tough weekend (and because I was sold the wrong size of chains!) and broke down about 20 miles away from home! Result: took us almost 6h to drive 175 miles!
When we finally got home we found out about 2-3 ft of snow covering the driveway. Nothing special if it wasn't for me being alone to clean it up :)
Started to remove the snow but the machine died on me! (Strange thing given the skills I developed cleaning up lots of snowy driveways in Portugal...). Luckily I remembered to close the choke valve and pump some gas into the combustion chamber before attempting to start the engine again. Got the thing running again and drove it slower. Problem solved.
Went to sleep. When we woke up we headed to a store to buy a new set of chains (not without first having to unfreeze the Hot Tub locker that had frozen during the night). Did that and was advised by two people to put the chains right way because there was a "chain control a mile ahead". So we did... and then drove about 18 miles without running into any chain control! At this time we decided to take the chains off and realized we had damaged another chain badly... Headed off to the resort without chains at all. Of course the roads in the resort had not been plowed and we had some trouble parking!
Parked and hit the slopes. Sat registered the record low temp so far in the winter season!
The fresh powder was good but it was so late that the slopes were all chewed up... Even so, some of us still managed to find deep snow pack parts to bury themselves into!
End of the day: road was mostly dry and we headed home without snow chains. The romantic evening made us forget the hardships of the previous night and day: hot tub (under the snow) to relax and a chicken pasta helped us sleeping better!
Sunday is a new day. The snow is back and the road is clean! Good news until we run into a chain control that came out of nothing and for no reason at all! We were forced to put chains. After some conversations I understood they do this because of all the newbies that don't know how to drive even under minimal ice conditions and have propensity to test their side airbags against the snow walls on the side of the roads. Anyways, of course we brokedown another chain because there was no freakin snow or ice in the road! Took that chain off and drove with just one chain.
Finally hit the slopes again! Skied 'till the end of the day and decided to drive without chains at all. We had no problems... until we reached the highway junction and the traffic had been held for 2-3 hrs due to an accident. This was one of the few moments we were lucky because we only waited about 15 min and the road was open again. Moreover, because there were so many cars driving together the road was clean and we didn't have to use chains at all! The guys that stood 2-3 hrs before that junction were so eager to get home that traffic on the highway was fast as hell and we got home in about 3h15m (compare with 6h!)
And this was just another regular weekend in the mountain (for non-SUV drivers of course!).
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