It is adventure just to get to the blogging part

At some point I would like to be doing something that makes me post almost every day, it may be a few years but it will happen. Adventures sometime are just part of life in general, at least in my eyes. For instance, we took a trip by train to L. A. two weekends ago and I had an adventure to post. Life just is very busy sometimes and you can't find time, or sometimes the will power to sit and write at the computer because you are too tired from work. I might not have been at this today except that we came back early from Disneyland today. First that story...lol
Last night Cute Fiancee told me she wanted to go to Disneyland on Sunday and that we could go down and get a hotel. We have yearly passes to D-land and go there often. Cute Fiancee is a Disney junkie I think...grin. We have this one hotel down in Anaheim, about a mile from the park, that has nice rates and the beds aren't too bad. I got the room for $55 for one nite, not bad for that area with area average of at least double that for a hotel room.
I must digress here for a bit to tie this into the "life gets in the way of blogging" part. We have been having trouble with the transmission in our little Geo Metro Convertible.
(the snow was on the ground today more on that bit in a minute)
I know, I know, it is a Metro, but it has some features that make it kind of a collectors item.
It can go topless, plus it gets 45 MPG. Ok, so last week I had to take the transmission out of the car to get it rebuilt. I drove it down to my brothers house. The trans was really making noise when I got there. I was there so I could have a little help getting it out of the car. A couple of beers, a few spins of the air tools and we had the trans down in a half hour. These cars are so easy to work on.
I took it to a friend for rebuilding, and it was back to me by Friday. Yesterday, Saturday, my brother came up and got me and the trans and we had breakfast and drove back to his house and reversed the process. Gravity is your friend when taking a transmission out of the car, it will naturally fall out of the car after unbolting everything. Going back into the car is always much more fun, and takes more beer. Lucky for us that trans can't way more than 35lbs. It took us maybe and hour to wrestle it back in. After a test drive all was well so I drove the car up the mountain to go get the cute fiancee from work. Metro drives great no noise from the trans we are good. At this point I would like to thank my brother Eric for his help, he is always helpful when it is car fixing time. This is when cute fiancee figured Disney would be fun and that it would be nice if we took the Metro instead of the truck to save gas.
Saturday night we grab our cloths, some food for lunch at D-land, and made the reservation for our hotel, and drove down to Anaheim. The plan was to check in and go into the park in hopes to catch the fireworks show they have every night, but unfortunately my pass was blocked out for that date. Funny thing about these passes, unless you buy Mondo Superduper Premium Pass, there are block out dates. Up to this point we have never run into this problem, mainly because we look it up before we leave. Instead of going in the park we went through Down Town Disney and looked in the shops Then headed back to the Hotel.
Our 3:30 am wake up call was from some knuckleheads that have no sense that they should keep there voices down that early in the morning, yelling and cackling. I rolled over and went back to sleep and dreamed I had gone "postal" on loud people at some hotel. Woke up at a better time , check out of the hotel and went to breakfast. Then head to the park, at this point I would like to say thank goodness we bought cute fiancee the Mondo Superduper Premium Pass, because it gets us free parking at D-land. We put our lunch in a locker at the picnic area and head into the park. We like going in and seeing the lithographs at the new gallery that is in the old bank building on main street. We found two cool lithos and grabbed them and took them back to the locker. At this point cute fiancee is looking a little uncomfortable about something. She says it is nothing, so I suggest we take a train ride around the park so as not to push her to hard if she isn't feeling well. I could tell she wasn't well. She was trying to tough it out. After the train ride we walked to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, one of our favorites, and she went down hill from there. She was in tears.
I know what was going through her mind. If we went home now the money we spent on everything would be a giant waist, but she was not in any shape to walk the park. I'm glad she was direct in the way she said we need to go home. She worries me when she doesn't tell me that she needs something in times like this. We grab our stuff and head for the car. No stress if you have the passes we just come back at a later date and enjoy ourselves. If this had happened and we had paid for admission we would have been out $200 and parking.
Here is where the snow comes in. It was cool this morning in Anaheim. I knew we had rain coming in but it was just a slight chance, besides Disney is actually kind of fun in the rain or cold, less people. We make it to about Ontario and I can see the mountains. I can see the haze that shrouds the mountain when it is snowing. My little expletive at this point wakes cute fiancee.
I point up towards home to show her it is snowing. Just a reminder we are driving the Metro here and I only really drive it in the summer time. Here in the Southern California Mountains they make you put chains on for traction in icy conditions.
We head up the hill, get halfway up, and we can see that it was snowing a lot lower earlier. Snow on May 23, in So. California, Global Warming my Disney loving Butt. We get almost to the top and hadn't got to a Highway Patrol Chain control point yet. There is a whole bunch of cars all stopped at this one turn though. It was still coming down pretty hard. I turned the car around and was heading back down the hill to go buy some chains for the vehicle I never drive in the winter. We made it two turns back down hill when I saw blue sky to the west. I'll be damned if I'm buying chains for my summer car. We turned around again and I decided to wait to see if the road cleared and the snow would stop. We pulled into a turn out and watched the idiots going about their snowy stupidity. If you have ever lived on the mountain you may have seen some of these people.
We had the down hill lanes people driving at 2 MPH on wet pavement, no snow sticking, and a line of 20 cars behind the leader, like cattle, not wanting to change lanes afraid they will slip off the mountain. Back in the day we use to call them, Flatlanders, those people that drive really slow and don't use turn outs. These are the ones that finally do drive off the mountain because one of our notoriously suicidal squirrels jump in front of them.
Then we had the fly up the friggen mountain, as fast as your vehicle will go, full time people going up hill. In my High School Days I might have fit into this category. We sat there and several of these types came flying around this corner near the turn out we were sitting in and probably crapped their pants when they had to slam on their brakes because of the line of cars that was backed up ahead. IDIOTS!
Traffic was clearing and the sun came out in less than five minutes. So we pulled out and made our way up the hill to the area the cars were all stopped at. Another full timer came up behind us. We are in the center lane waiting in line to get up to what ever is happening ahead. This arrogant idiot doesn't slow down and just crosses the double yellows and pulls up past several vehicles in line going into head on traffic. British Landrover loving, idiot. We make it up to where we can see what is going on. There is several pile-ups on this turn. The turn is the first one on the downhill side when you hit the 4 lane on our mountain. This turn is slopped some so the downhill side is the high side and the uphill is the low side. We can see what happened. People just put on there brakes and spun and helplessly bumped into each other.
Not one CHP around anywhere....lol We made it by this tie-up and headed up the hill.
We ran into another place where people with no chains were sliding around. I stopped way back and let them sort themselves out. About this time a line of cars trying to keep up momentum come zipping around this corning, lead by a pickup truck. IDIOTS The pickup gets stopped by on coming traffic and now he is one of the people trying to get traction and slipping all over.
I had backed down the hill some to keep in the clear tracks that traffic had cleared in the snow.
We waited a few minutes and got to a point where we could pass again and pulled up the hill.
This was a very wet snow. Very slushy. We made it to with in100' of the house before we got stopped by more "flatlanders" sideways on the hill by our house. We unloaded right there and got cute fiancee up to the house and in bed. I dug out the steps up to the house and started the 4X4 to make some tracks that I could get the Metro all the way to the house. I had left the Metro down near a place that cars get hit all the time in these conditions. Dug two paths in the snow and drove the little car into our parking spot. Then I came in and started a fire and turned on the computer and BLOGGED...wooo hoo