The Fox Den

I’ll write something about the awesome ski weekend I had later but first I feel I have to start with the doomed journey back to Jacksonville.  I was supposed to arrive back in JAX around 1930 on the 12th of February.  Its currently 0500 on the 13th of February and I’m sitting in the airport waiting for a car rental place to open so I can get a car and go get ready for work.  So this journey has some legs left in it but its about done now.  It was an interesting past 24 hours:

It got REALLY cold up in Snowshoe.  Cold enough that you worry that your car won’t start.  It had gotten to at least -1 F but it was probably colder than that.  The driver of the car we went in took precautions to ensure he could start the car in the morning.  We were going to hit the road around 10:30 since I had a 4pm flight.  That’s when the trouble started.  After we got the Suburban loaded up, we tried to start it.  No good.  My coworker tried for about 30 minutes and only succeeded in draining the battery.  We then tried hooking jumper cables up to another car that came with another part of our group.  That didn’t do anything.

We thought it was going to be ready around 11:15 and we all piled into the car to wait.   By 11:40 nothing had happened except my toes were going numb (did I mention it was around 0 F?) and I went back into our rental condo to wait for the car to start without endangering my extremities.  That ended up being a great move since 12:30 rolled around and we still weren’t close.  We had, at this point, an employee  of the lodge with his huge truck being used to charge the battery on ours.  They tried this for a while.  I’m not really sure what they did because we were inside watching Futurama and I was watching the hours slip by.  My 4:15 flight became a pipe dream and the 5:50 flight soon was as well.  But after running an extension cord to the car’s built in block heater (its a diesel) and charging the battery for a couple hours, the truck finally started up at 3:30.  It was a 3 – 31/2 hour drive but there was still a flight that left at 7:23.  It was still possible to get home.

Fate did not want me to fly home tonight though.  About an hour into the drive, the Suburban started to die.  The engine would just choke as we drove and the driver was able to coax a few more starts out of it as it did in order to get us stuck at least in the midst of a few farms in an otherwise desolate part of West Virginia.  Did I mention it was really cold out?  We didn’t want to get stuck on the side of the road.

As we tried to get the car started again, the owner of the house we’d stopped in front of walked out.  We couldn’t believe it but the guy was in a mechanic’s jumpsuit.  He was certified in medium to large diesels and had experience on this particular engine.  (Not shocking since it was popular…at least not shocking that a diesel tech would know it.)  This was about as lucky as we could get in this horribly unlucky drive.  Sure enough, the guy was able to diagnose and solve the problem.  Unfortunately this was a nearly hour long delay.  There was no way I was getting a flight out now.

I still went to the airport.  I had pretty much decided in the car (though I didn’t want to tell anyone else at that moment since I knew the guy who was driving felt pretty bad about everything even if he had no control over it.  Shit happens and it definitely happened!) that I was going to drive from Roanoke, VA to Jacksonville.  Google maps estimated 10 hours but I thought that was pretty conservative.  I ended up making it in 8.5.  The other option was to stop at Charlotte and pick up a morning flight but the flight I would have had to take left at 5:45 in the morning and got me here around 10am.  That might have worked if I had any clothes with me.  Those are at my hotel though.

Did I mention I had a somewhat important meeting this afternoon?  I was pretty desperate to get back here for it because I already moved it once.   My drive took me through Charlotte and I considered my options as I drove through but I just committed to the drive and pressed on.  It wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it’d be.  I’m going to pay for this tonight.  But I should be able to get into the office by 8am so I can roll out at a reasonable time.

The only part of this that I’m really bummed about is there is apparently a pretty well known donut place by Snowshoe that we were going to hit on the way back.  I didn’t get my donut 8(