Blue Mountain Part II

What an adventure this day was!

After waking up and watching price is right, went outside to see snow starting to fall. Didn't think much of it at the time - I mean, snow? in Collingwood, that's expected.

Then on to the car, and seeing on the dash a good ol' parking ticket. Nothing too bad right? Day could go better, but it's just a parking ticket afterall. Pay it when I get home, then I am good to go.

Start up the car, brush off the snow, and then went back into the car. Noticing that the mirror still had some snow on it, I rolled down the window, and brushed the snow off. Then pressed the button to roll the window back up. I pressed it... ... ... and nothing happened.

So here we are now, a little bit past noon, and it's snowing (blowing snow), we are in the car, and one of the windows is FULLY down. Snow was starting to full into the controls, and so I figured we gotta cover it w/ something (in case the snow gets in and melts, causing an even bigger mess). After a phone call home, I was told that in addition to the doors not working too well, that window I just pulled down 'normally can't go down cuz is stuck'. So thinking, AWESOME!, next step was to call CAA and see what they can do. Their response: sure, we will be there in 30 min to 2 hours...

In effect saying we are on our own for the next hour, we looked at a map, saw a Toyota dealership and thought, 'hey, let's go there and see what they can do'. So we started driving down, with snow blowing through the driver side, and all of us wearing our toques and big jacket like the day before when we went snowboarding.

As I am driving down, first I tried to go the no glove approach... which soon after I had to ditch and wear one glove (as luck would have it, there were no thin gloves so I had to drive with the thicker leather gloves). Pretty soon though my face was getting cold, so we pull up a red blanket and used that to cover the driver side where the window would be. Though because of the blanket, I could not see the left mirror, it was a reasonable trade-off, seeing as I held the blanket, I could feel the gusts of wind that would have landed on my face had I not have the blanket. I had two fully functional mirrors, so face vs. left mirror, bye bye mirror! :P.

I have to say, this was soooo ghetto, and sad to the point where by the time we got into town (which was about 15 minutes in), Swimming Buddy and I just started laughing. Sure we realize as we were in town that we had no more wiper fluid either, but how can things go any worse! In a little less than 2 hours since we woke up, we had an injured person, and 2 frozen popsicles. While we are laughing at our plight, we were debating heavily what we'd do if Toyota can't help us. Whether to:
a) turn up the heat and drive 1.5 hr on the highway to get back home
b) keep holding onto this red blanket as we cruise down the 400
c) drive to Canadian Tire and buy ceram wrap and duct tape to seal the open gap.
... after a few minutes, we decided to put these in the backburner, until it's confirmed that Toyota can't help us.

So we got to Toyota a little bit past 1:00pm.. right about when they were closing for the day. I rushed in, told them our situation, then the mechanic comes out, looks at it and gives out what I heard as an 'uh-oh'. Before I had time to react to the 'uh-oh', the mechanic starts banging on the door panel and then the window magically started sliding up! Holding my breath as the window continued to creep up to its fully closed position, I had nothing but 'thank you's and 'you are the best' for the mechanic. Toyota at Collingwood - really nice people. I mean, it's the 31st, they are about to close up, and they are willing to check out a stray's car! What nice people!

So after an hour driving around town, the window was fixed! We decided to go for a quick bite and warm up before driving back. Having been delayed by Price Is Right and this little hunt for Toyota, we come back to see the 401 jam packed eastbound. So as we saw how 401 is packed from the 400 all the way to 403, Swim Buddy and I decided to use our great navigation skills to chart up a new route to get back home.

Good thing we did because it turns out there were two accidents that happened, clogging up effectively the entire section from Keele to Kipling. So getting on right after Keele, we hit ZERO traffic!

Dropped off Swim Buddy at the hospital to get a checkup on her hand, and I proceeded to go buy some chicken wings to prepare for the tonight.