Slippery Winter Weather Memory

It's snowed a lot here in the past 8 days or so. I'd say we have accumulated about 18 inches. Yesterday it snowed for a better part of the day, and when we awoke this morning (after shoveling no less than 3 times yesterday), it was time to shovel again. I wandered out at noon time to run a few errands, and I found it to be a bit slick on the streets in our neighborhood as they had not yet been plowed.

I slid (just a bit) as I left the driveway, and for whatever reason, that simple slide reminded me of an incident that happened about 16 years ago when I lived in Peoria.

My friend, Cindy, was living with me for a few months right in the middle of the winter. I was housesitting for some friends who were out of the country on a mission. The house was on the west bluff in Peoria in an old neighborhood that still has cobblestone streets (which must have been a novelty at one point in time but are really now just kind of a pain).

It had ICED in Peoria (which is a curse far worse than snow). A neighbor had come to warn me about just how terrible the streets were. She recommended that if I absolutely had to go out that I get on a main road. She specifically warned me that the cobblestone streets were terribly slick. Does anyone think that this story ends well??

My ride? It was a Mecury Grand Marquis, circa 1987. This thing was a beast. I snagged this picture of the Internet, but it looked just like this. This bad boy guzzled gas and oil, but had a relatively smooth ride. I backed into a car once with it, and I barely even felt it; there was $5000.00 damage to the other lady's car (who didn't yield BTW...when she saw me and I didn't see her!)

My friend, Nathan, called it the "SS Wendy." It was a tank.
So, Cindy and I get in the car to go somewhere inconsequential, and I take a turn onto one of the side streets (which I'd been admonished NOT to do). The tank started sliding, and there was no stopping it. I pop the car in neutral, turn into the curve, pump the breaks and said, "Oh, Sh*%, Oh, Sh*%, Oh, Sh*%, Oh, Sh*%" about 50 times. We were careening right for...wait for it...a yellow VW bug.
I got the car "almost" stopped when we kind of "nudged" it in the bumper. We looked. There was no damage. How ever was I going to back the car off of the bug? Solution? It was so icy that we literally pushed the tank off of the car, spun the car enough to get it pointed in the right direction and drove promptly home.
We still talk about that story to this day. It is amazing that I didn't smash the crap out of that tiny car with the Mercury! Slip, slide and away! I miss the "SS Wendy." It didn't make it out to Utah with me in 1995. It had some unidentifiable electrical problem that caused it to just randomly stop running whilst I was driving down the street.
Be safe out there! If your neighbor warns to you, perhaps you should heed the warning! Peace out!