The snow on my driveway has nearly melted and, as is traditional, I have backed into the snowbank and gotten stuck more than once.
I manage to avoid getting stuck in the snow for the entire winter but once spring hits, I stop paying attention and things happen. At least one side of my van is clean(er) than the other because of various close encounters with the snowbank beside my driveway. This was particularly evident on our trip to Vancouver.
In a city that does not have much of a snowfall, melting slushy dirty snow is not much of a problem. They get a lot of rain and all of the cars look shiny and new. They are all clean. Like, really clean. Some might say, abnormally clean.
Our van was/is not clean.
We washed the van, as do most people, at the beginning of a trip. By the time we hit the old Art Knapps outside of town, it was already filthy and it stayed that way for our Lower Mainland vacation.
The untidy state could have been embarrassing if not for a few facts:
1. We could always find the van in a parking lot because we would be the only grime-covered, silver Caravan rather than the other thousand, clean silver Caravans.
2. We are saving water by not washing the van which is environmentally friendly.
3. The dirt hides the dent that appeared when I opened the passenger door into a rather large rock.
Other than the dent, we escaped our vacation relatively cleanly and had fun playing in the sand and admiring the spring crocuses and hyacinths. Because we drive around so much when we are down there, we were in a hurry to get home and out of the filthy van which may explain the speeding ticket that we received just outside of McLeese Lake (my husband was driving).
At the time of the ticket, my husband actually was not speeding. He had been speeding earlier in the day so it not worth driving to Williams Lake to contest the ticket and we will call it karma. I respect and value our police officers, yet it is hard to take a 20-year old swaggering, puffed-up young man, drunk on power, seriously.
I may have just kept knitting and not shown the appropriate amount of deference as he was peacocking around letting us know that he can give us a ticket based on what he assumed has happened (i.e. we caught up to the car behind him therefore we were speeding). Obviously it is important to not speed, however I have yet to meet one person who does not, on occasion, zip around on the highway when the roads are dry, the sun is shining and no one is around.
For the rest of the drive home, I may have ranted about the injustice of it all and how Highway 97 was turning into a police state.
I wish everyone a safe spring break and remember to slow down - there is a section of highway around McLeese Lake that has turned into the Minority Report and the Thought Police are patrolling.
Officer Swaggerpants is on the case.
If you are even thinking about speeding, don't.
