Freezing Rain - I have never known anything like it!

I woke up this morning at 5:40am by an automated phone call from the school. You may not know this but because there are school buses here that pick up this kids. If, for whatever reason, there is a delay, an automated phone call rings every household (with a kid at that school) to say the bus will be delayed by so many hours.

Last night we got freezing rain. Being a Brit that has familiarity both the north and south of the UK, I thought I had my fair share of experience with crap weather. When I heard that there would be a delay because of freezing rain, I thought to myself “well that’s we call sleet… that’s no big deal”… and off I go to walk the garage to pick up my car to take it to the second garage.

How wrong could I have been! Freezing rain is the weirdest thing. It coats everything in the finest layer of ice, but it not the kind of ice you get back home that looks like frost. It just looks like, well, puddles…normal puddles. As soon as I stepped outside the door, I slipped and fell on my arse! I held got up (eventually) and held onto the door handle desperately trying not to fall over again.

(2 minute & 52 seconds in is what was going through my head when it happened)

I made it to the end of the street, before falling on my bum a second time. My lovely new phone went sailing down the street. Luckily it missed the storm drain.

I did a penguin type walk all the way to the garage at the end of our road. It turns out walking on the squishy/crunchy ice grass is safer than the paths. I finally made it to the garage to pick up the car.

I drove it to the second garage. The difference between this garage and the other one is that instead of hydraulic lifts, they had an inspection pit... Instead of a shiny white teeth smile he was chewing tobacco… Instead of smart overalls with their names hand stitched on them, they had jeans (complete with oil stains and hairy bum cleavage). I left him the keys and my mobile number.

I got a call from him later in the day. “we have looked at it, and we will needs some parts so sorry if this sounds a bit steep but with labor and tax it comes to $425” he says. Or course I pretended to be shocked and disgusted with the price he had quoted me, but I was literally half the price of the first place. Needless to say it is booked in for next week.

The downside is that this weekend we are without car.