Thursday, November 27, 2008
Thanksgiving 1996
Then there was the time -- it might have been 1996 or 1997 -- that we tried to go to Sidetrack for Thanksgiving.
We packed up the turkey and the rest of the fixings and left for Georgetown early on Thursday morning.
About half way between St. Paul and Hudson on I-94, we drove over a fairly large piece of angle iron in the middle of our lane. It became visible from under the car ahead of us too quickly and there was too much traffic for me to swerve.
CLUNK!
Well, we hit something. Tried the brakes. They worked. Tested the steering. It worked. Maybe nothing.
We drove on to the Baldwin exit and decided to pull into a gas station there for a visual check. I looked under the van and saw gasoline dripping pretty quickly out of a gash in the gas tank.
UhOh!
A guy at the station gave me some gooey stuff to try to seal the gash. No luck, but my arm got covered with gasoline. The station attendant assured me that no repair shops would be open in Baldwin (or anywhere else nearby).
We got back on the freeway headed west. My companions had instructions to watch carefully for anyone flicking a cigarette butt out a window ahead of us. We drove the potential fire bomb back home. (By the time we got home, we'd used and lost enough gas so the tank wasn't dripping any more.)
That evening, I came down with nasty cold/flu symptoms that I attributed to the chill of evaporating gas on my arm before I got to the rest room to wash up.
The next morning, the van went to the dealer's service garage for a new gas tank.
We never did get to Sidetrack for Thanksgiving. (But today would probably have been a good day -- although it was snowing pretty heavily just east and north of Georgetown according to the Twin Cities weather report this afternoon.)
Maybe, with global warming, there's still a chance we'll cook a Thanksgiving turkey in Sidetrack's oven someday.
We packed up the turkey and the rest of the fixings and left for Georgetown early on Thursday morning.
About half way between St. Paul and Hudson on I-94, we drove over a fairly large piece of angle iron in the middle of our lane. It became visible from under the car ahead of us too quickly and there was too much traffic for me to swerve.
CLUNK!
Well, we hit something. Tried the brakes. They worked. Tested the steering. It worked. Maybe nothing.
We drove on to the Baldwin exit and decided to pull into a gas station there for a visual check. I looked under the van and saw gasoline dripping pretty quickly out of a gash in the gas tank.
UhOh!
A guy at the station gave me some gooey stuff to try to seal the gash. No luck, but my arm got covered with gasoline. The station attendant assured me that no repair shops would be open in Baldwin (or anywhere else nearby).
We got back on the freeway headed west. My companions had instructions to watch carefully for anyone flicking a cigarette butt out a window ahead of us. We drove the potential fire bomb back home. (By the time we got home, we'd used and lost enough gas so the tank wasn't dripping any more.)
That evening, I came down with nasty cold/flu symptoms that I attributed to the chill of evaporating gas on my arm before I got to the rest room to wash up.
The next morning, the van went to the dealer's service garage for a new gas tank.
We never did get to Sidetrack for Thanksgiving. (But today would probably have been a good day -- although it was snowing pretty heavily just east and north of Georgetown according to the Twin Cities weather report this afternoon.)
Maybe, with global warming, there's still a chance we'll cook a Thanksgiving turkey in Sidetrack's oven someday.
