Snowy siege-mound
In the last couple days we’ve experienced some pretty heavy storms which have settled large quantities of snow on our lawn and driveway. The lawn I haven’t been too worried about, but wow…between the naturally occurring quantity of snow falling from the sky (which is not annoying) and the mountainous volume of snow which has been pushed onto my driveway by the snow-plow trucks (which is annoying), the result has been a veritable siege-mound being created at the front driveway entrance to our house.
When we tried to back out of the driveway the first day it snowed, I did the “put the car in reverse and push the accelerator to see what will happen” method of breaking through the wall of snow barring us from street access (this is vastly different than the get out of the van and grab the shovel, moving at least enough to make paths for the wheels and allow the under-carriage to clear method). In a triumphant exit through the siege-mound we breached the wall and escaped our driveway, making our way to 7 Highway en route to my sister’s house. As we drove down the street, a truck pulled up next to us motioning for us to roll down the window.
My wife rolled down her window and the person in the truck told us that the rear passenger-side wheel on our van was seized-up; it wasn’t rolling over, it was just dragging stationary behind the van as it was being propelled forward down the busy road. We thanked the driver of the truck for the “heads up” and then pulled over in a parking lot to see that, sure enough, the wheel was locked up tighter than banks after the financial crisis. We had a wonderful niece-in-law who followed us, as the van dragged its “broken leg” along, all the way to the mechanic shop in town. Not knowing what it could be, but knowing that it needed to be fixed, I dropped the key off in the after-hours key drop box.
I received a call this morning, a couple days later, from the mechanic shop. They said that the wheel was packed hard with snow and ice (…a vision of my heavy foot on the accelerator forcing the van to collide against the snowy siege-mound raced to my mind), but once they took the wheel off and melted the ice the wheel was free to spin again. Then I heard, “But there’s one more thing…”, the owner of the shop continued, “…your intake manifold has a bad gasket and the intake valves need to be cleaned and possibly replaced.”
This was not good news as we had just had it in the shop a couple weeks ago and spent a good chunk of change on a tune up and new set of tires. It seems any time you take your vehicle to the shop, even for the smallest thing, there is inevitably going to be something bigger wrong that needs to be fixed. So, we will have to pay the piper tomorrow morning. I do so hope that the cause of our manifold gasket blowing out is not directly linked to my accelerated snowy-siege-mound reverse maneuvering. One may simply never know.
