After a long cold day of skiing my son and I were at the mini van hastily preparing for our two and a half hour ride home. It was freezing out and we were in a hurry…big surprise huh? I put the skis up on top of the roof rack and my cell phone rings. I reach into my ski jacket, work through a number of layers and get to the cell phone before it stops ringing. It’s my bride and she wants to know how things are coming and when she could expect us. I’m my usual charming self and rush her off the phone. I race to the back of the van, get my ski boots off and take the rest of my ski clothing off so that I have a comfortable ride home. We jump back into the van throw on the heat and head out.
I get about a ¼ mile out of the parking lot and question myself…”Did I close down the latches on the ski roof rack?” I think to myself, “I must have, what kind of a Block Head wouldn’t close the latches down?” And to reinforce my belief, I’m thinking I probably would have heard the skis rumbling around up there.
I’ve now been driving for about 20 minutes and I’m getting on a significant highway…and its still bugging me. Did I close the latches? Now I see a service turn off from the highway. For a split second I think maybe I should just pull over and check it out to be sure. Nope, I’lI have none of that. I’m making good time, its toasty warm in the van now, who needs to stop? At this point I’m thinking to myself, I’m going over 65 miles an hour, if the skis weren’t locked down, there’s no way they’d be staying on top of the van. I’m also thinking if they weren’t locked down, I’d be getting the “High-Sign” from other drivers letting me know I had an issue up top. Kind of like in the movie “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” when John Candy gets onto the highway with Steve Martin going in the wrong direction...and people are trying to warn him by screaming at him, “You’re going the Wrong Way!” Candy or “Dell Griffith’s” classic return line, “Oh how do they know where we’re going, they’re drunk.” Seconds later he gets squished between two 18 Wheelers.
We’ve now been driving for 40 minutes. We’re merging onto a stretch of highway and its six lanes wide now. If you want to keep up with the 18 Wheelers you need to be going at least 80 miles per hour. I finally think to myself, “They must be locked down because there’s no way….”
With that last thought I heard “Lift-off”. I look in the rearview mirror and see four skis bouncing down the highway behind me. At that point I felt like if I had put myself in the same category with block heads, I’d be insulting the block heads. The absolutely only saving grace was that I didn’t impale anyone; otherwise this blog would probably have been written from Cell Block C at one of the charm schools in PA.
I pull over to the left hand median. I tell my son to stay put and I get out of the van and go search for slightly used skis. I come across my son’s rental skis. They’re actually still locked together and look pretty good. Then upon further inspection I notice the back end of the skis are shattered…And that my friends is why we opt for the rental insurance.
My skis were another story. I run further down the highway and find them. They’re separated and a couple of lanes deep. (First, you have to understand I really liked these skis…a lot. I got them the season after the disintegrating ski boot incident, and they had been bery bery good to me.) It’s dark, freezing cold, and cars and trucks are whizzing by at mach speeds. I’m trying to time my run out into traffic to retrieve my property. What it reminded me of was a Movie from 1999 that starred Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy call, “Bowfinger.” There is a scene in the movie where Steve Martin is directing a “C” movie. He has Eddie Murphy’s mentally challenged character run back and forth across the LA Freeway, almost giving him a heart attack. Just as I’m about to make my move, two large Tandem Tractor Trailers run over my skis. They ran over them so hard, they crushed and ripped the bindings right off the skis. (So, like the ski boots from a couple of years before, this is a lost cause.) Then naturally I wake up and think, “Oh yeah, I have a wife and two kids; and one of them is a couple of hundred feet up the highway.” I get back to the van and have a most enjoyable ride home. (When my son is grown and in therapy, this trip will be talked about in great detail.)
The first guy I went to for new skis lost the sale because he couldn’t keep the smirk off his face.
No comments:
Post a Comment