Cold Weather Archives

October 26, 2013October 27, 2013

Halloween Comes to Me

When you turn into your motel and see something like this in the parking space next to you, you have to wonder if maybe you made a bad turn somewhere.

The young folks (I hope they are folks, since they are in rooms around and above me) were headed to the 39th annual Halloween party sponsored by the city of Athens and Ohio University.

I had just come from covering my first OU football game since since 1970. It wasn’t the 57 degrees and sunny promised. It was in the 40s, cloudy and with a brisk wind. I warned the gal in the blue costume that her skin would match her clothes if she stayed out very long.

It’s a wild party

The Halloween (and many other block party events) have the reputation for degenerating into public displays of drunken debauchery, sometimes ending up with cars being overturned and fires being started.

I was looking forward to covering my first Athens riot since the university closed in 1970 two weeks after four students were gunned down by the National Guard at Kent State.

The only problem was that it was cold, I was tired and parking spaces were non-existent.

So, when one of the kids asked if I would take their photo with one of their cameras. I honored the request, then decided I’d rather have Halloween come to me instead of me chasing it.

I’m officially old.

October 26, 2013

Frost Leaves Me Cold

When I walked out of my room at the motel where I’m staying in Athens, Ohio, I had an unpleasant surprise: my car was encased in a solid sheet of ice.

What is on the back of my van?

I spotted the housekeeper who throws me new towels every morning coming across the parking lot. She’s a friendly sort.

Leading her around to the back of my van, I asked, “What do you see on the back of the car?”

She looked at the car, then at me, and shot me a confused look.

This is against the law

“That’s a Florida license tag on this vehicle,” I clarified. “Don’t you folks in Ohio know that it’s against the law for a Florida vehicle to be covered in ice?”

She laughed, but it was a nervous kind of laugh.

I wonder if I’ll have new housekeeper in the morning?

Since I didn’t have Friend Jan along to scrape the ice off the windows, I just let the engine run for about 10 minutes, then scraped the ice off the mirrors with a credit card.

January 31, 2013

Gateway Arch and Goodbye

Friend Jan and I had planned to visit St. Louis’ Gateway Arch Tuesday, but the torrential rains kept us from our goal. We got to the site too close to her departure time for her to see the movie on the building of the structure, one of my favorites, but she did get to walk around it taking photos.

You have to lick the arch

I tried to convince her that it was tradition that newcomers to the arch had to lick it. Daughter-in-Law Sarah must have warned her about that gambit, because she got close enough to tease the arch, but not close enough to give it a healthy lick.

Turned down tram ride

I think she was ready to take the 4-minute tram ride to the top of the arch despite all the horror stories about claustrophobia and getting stuck. Ready, that is, until she got into a mock-up and realized that she’d be sharing that small space with four other riders.

I got the feeling her togetherness quota had already been exceeded on this trip.

Time to wave goodbye

Eleven days, 2,422 miles and nine states after we started our trek, it was time to put her on a plane back to sunny Florida. She made her escape just in time. Shortly before I dropped her off, I noticed some white pellets on my blue jacket that weren’t dandruff. The wind picked up and the white stuff kept coming down harder. It wasn’t sticking yet, but there was enough of it to blow around in the roadway.

I met with some folks about a possible St. Louis photo exhibit, then went to dinner with Friend Shari. When we got out of the restaurant, the stuff was still coming down and I had ice on the windshield. That’s when I decided to stay at Brother Mark’s house one more night rather than chance finding a slick spot on the way back to Cape.

Is this going to work out?

To be honest, before we left Florida, I wasn’t sure how this pairing was going to work out. Sure, we had worked and biked with each other for years, but being trapped in a car with someone for days is another thing. That’s why Wife Lila flies back home and I drive.

After it was all over, Jan and I are still speaking each other. She and Mother bonded. (I’d wake up in the morning hearing they chattering away in the kitchen like magpies.) I even noticed a few times when Jan said, “The next time I come back….”

Photo Gallery of the Last Day

Here are some pictures of Jan’s last day in Missouri and the Gateway Arch. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.

January 26, 2013January 26, 2013

Home, Home Again

When we were getting close to Cape, I told Friend Jan, “The Cape bridge is really pretty at night. You might want to be ready to shoot a photo when we get closer.”

She started waving her cellphone around, making little squeals of what I hope were pleasure.

I had already called Mother to tell her we were about home and asking her if she wanted us to pick up anything from Hamburger Express. She did.

I had just made the right turn at River Campus to go work my way down William when Jan hollered “STOP!! Turn around! Look at the moon!”

She used up a whole day’s worth of exclamation points in 12 seconds.

So, minutes after entering Missouri, we were exiting Missouri, to go back into Illinois to go back to Missouri. You can see how this has been a long trip.

Day started off with ice

We spent too much time sightseeing on Thursday (pictures to come) to make it all the way from Athens, Ohio, to Cape in one shot, so we stopped on the west side of Louisville. The weather report didn’t look good, so I wanted to be on the west side of town so we wouldn’t hit morning rush hour and snow at the same time.

When I went to load the car, my head and feet almost swapped places. The whole parking lot was a shiny sheet of ice. I’ve never seen an ice sheen that perfectly smooth. The whole car was coated, too. It was time to give Jan a new experience: ice removal.

I handed her a can of spray deicer and a scraper and told her to have at it.

She handled that spray can like a well-trained riot cop with Mace.

“You need a smaller car”

When it came time for the scraping, she said, “You need a smaller car. I can’t reach all the way to the middle.”

“No, I need a taller passenger.”

That’s when I came clean: “The deicer speeds the process up, but the car’s defroster would have had the windshield warm enough for the wipers to slide the ice off,” I explained.

I should have waited until she put the can of deicer down before I broke that news.