Monday, December 20, 2010

How We Got Out

This is the next Sunday.  I was finally getting a little cabin fever.  Ahem.  Hubby got the tractor very stuck, and you can see all the little footprints where Hubby would "walk home" from his truck (parked up at the neighbor's) each night.

Sunken Tractor
The day before, I was beginning to get desperate.  I called a neighbor about borrowing his tractor, but he said his bucket-contraption wasn't working right.  I called my nearest neighbor (a wonderful older woman, who gives wayyy too much candy to my children) who'd had her driveway cleared (of WHAT, I might ask; hers wasn't like ours!) and she called the guy who did hers, and someone else who had offered.  Neither answered their phone, but she got a hold of a family who does odd jobs for her sometimes, and they came to take a look.  This was Sunday morning, and they thought that our portion of the driveway would take about 2 hours.  They charge a fantastic hourly rate (considering there are six or eight of them, from 11 years old to 60+(?)).  I gave the go-ahead, and they set to work with tractor and shovels.  
Help is on the way!
The snow was much wetter and heavier by this time, and it was not near as easy to move as they'd thought.  At 2.5 hours they were about halfway between my van and the neighbor's property line, and all the way through my driveway-clearing budget. :)  The old boy on the tractor had driven around the side of the driveway to help free my tractor, and I asked if he thought my van could traverse the ground there without getting stuck.  He thought so, so I asked him to clear that portion enough to get my van out instead of working further on the driveway.  He hollered and the rest of the group and their shovels marched up to where I was and set to work clearing the big drifts in the front of the motor home (oh, and I had my shovel too!  I could taste the freedom, and was happy to be doing something!).
It ain't pretty, but it works...
Before long the way was (kinda) clear, and I happily drove my van up to the neighbor's and parked it there (which is what I will be doing next time I lie in bed with the wind howling me awake after a snowfall).  For a week or more we parked the van there, and I was so grateful to be able to leave, that I almost didn't mind trekking a quarter-mile through mud and slush.  With children.  I DID come to mind the quarter-mile trek back, after dark, in the wind, with a sleeping baby in my arms. We made a family trip to town for Hubby's music practice, and ferried the groceries and baby home in his pickup afterwards. :)

These are the good ol' days!  When my kids are older and more experienced, they will look back on these things and realize how terribly weird we were.  And hopefully it will bring smiles to their faces.  

1 comment:

sariah said...

Wow!!!! It looks like your deepest snow was directly over the entire driveway! What a crazy adventure. Has that ever happened before? And here I was wishing for this dreary rain to turn into snow....

We had a similar story with our neighbor a mile away. She was due in a week and her husband was finishing a job up in PA. My husband and boys tried to dig her mini van out and realized an hour later that it was too gargantuan task. A co-worker brought an I.Power front end loader and that worked. But it had to be done a few more times because the wind kept drifting the snow more! She had her baby 3 days later. :-)