We went to a lovely little cabin in Lake Arrowhead for Christmas, hoping to see some snow. And we did!
Well, really, what we got was about 4 inches of snow and a severe winter ice storm.
Lake Arrowhead is high in the mountains, and the cabin was up in a steep, twisty-road neighborhood, so I was worried about how we would get out of there. I had tire cables, but I didn’t want to put them on because the road wasn’t snowy and driving those cables on pavement chews them up (we ended up using them on our way out anyway).
So I was lying in bed at about 5 am, and I heard snowplows, so I was like, “Yay! Now we won’t have a problem getting out of here,” and went back to sleep.
What I’d forgotten about plows is what they do to driveways. Block them. And you can’t see it in this picture, but those little boulders blocking us from the road are pure ice.
That wasn’t the worst of it. The car was entirely covered in about two inches of ice.
Long story longer, it took three hours to clear the plow mess (I had to break up the snow/ice chunks with an axe before I could shovel them out of the way), and to warm the car enough to melt some of the ice from it. Then as we were leaving we got stuck halfway in the road, halfway in the driveway, so I had to push the car out while Ayin deftly zigzagged us out onto the street.
Then the drive home took four hours. Ha ha.
The cabin was beautiful, though (I’ll post pics later), which was a good thing since our four days there were mostly filled with torrential rain, so it was impossible to go anywhere.
The night before we left the severe ice storm happened, and things were falling off of the tall pine trees onto the top of the cabin all night. It sounded like someone slowly dumping a wheelbarrow full of billiard balls onto the roof (with the occasional bowling ball thrown in just to make you jump).
But overall, it was a great adventure, and we came out of it smiling. I mean, we got to frolic in the snow with axes and shovels and tire cables. What more could anyone want?
