The Startling Confession of a Soggy Prius Owner
When you’re crouched next to your Prius on the descent south of Mt. Shasta, in a downpour that minutes earlier used to be snow, and you’re taking off snow chains for the second time in three hours, and your hair is dripping onto thumbs that are raw from manipulating small bits of frozen metal, and the only light that penetrates the black of a stormy night in the National Forest is from the headlights of the occasional eighteen-wheeler hurtling by a few terrifying feet away, and you’ve realized that the U-shaped eyelet used to fasten the end of the cable on the inside of the driver-side tire has been flattened somewhere in the last thirtysomething miles that your wife has had to drive at a frustratingly sluggish 24 miles per hour so that the eyelet is no longer U-shaped and your only hope of getting out of the freezing rain so that you can drive the remaining 260 miles of your trip at a normal speed is to ask the question “What Would MacGyver Do?” and subsequently determine that your best option is to pry open said eyelet with a strong piece of thin metal like the key to your wife’s workplace, strange thoughts run through your head, the most printable being:
“Dammit, I wish we drove a Hummer.”
9 Ripples from “The Startling Confession of a Soggy Prius Owner”
Jim says:
January 4, 2006 at 4:01 pm
Damn those U shaped eyelets!
So yeah, welcome home
... if that’s where you are.
Nicole says:
January 4, 2006 at 4:01 pm
Aww, man, that sounds deplorable. Absolutely deplorable. Hope that when you got home you had some tea and noticed that I now use firefox...well, half the time anyway.
zalm says:
January 5, 2006 at 2:01 am
Yeah, we’re home. There’s an awful lot of catching up to do, and we’re still fairly beat up from the drive, so I might continue to be light on posting for the next few days as I catch up on sleep and work and reading and replying to email and ripples.
On a positive note, however, we did actually see snow. So there’s that.
I actually haven’t spent much time with the ol’ server logs since we returned, so I didn’t see the big Firefox switch, Nicole. How’s it treating you?
Kevin says:
January 5, 2006 at 8:01 am
For the record, MacGyver would have used celery, a rubber band, and a tube of red wine lipstick.
unk says:
January 5, 2006 at 9:01 am
you forget to list the duct tape
zalm says:
January 5, 2006 at 11:01 am
The best I could do was an illicit banana, a twist tie, and a tube of lipstick ambiguously named “No. 24.”
Maybe with better light I could have made that work, but given the circumstances, I didn’t want to take any chances.
timmer k. says:
January 6, 2006 at 8:01 am
Dilemmas like the one you described are the continual fodder of midwesterners. Congratulations, Zalm--you can now call yourself a Minnesotan...eh?
And, as coincidence would have it, MacGyver did go to college in Minnesota. Where do you think he learned to make a waffle iron out of two snowshoes? Ah, the carnal knowledge that arises during the dead of winter.
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Kathy L. Dean says:
December 10, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Saw this blog when I Googled “Prius, Snow Chains.” My stomach hurts form laughing. I live in southern Oregon, and will be driving to Utah this week, I have a 2007 Prius and thought it wise to think about “Snow.”
What kind of chains should I get? I am a single woman so want something as simple as possible. I haul my Prius on a flat bed trailer behind my RV when I go on trips, but am only taking the Prius this time around.
Thanks...Kathy
zalm says:
December 10, 2007 at 11:43 pm
Hi Kathy,
I’m glad I was able to make you laugh.
Good luck with the drive, especially given all the wet weather you’ve had up there. (Well, assuming you’re west of the Cascades, anyhow.)
I haven’t really ever had much luck with snow chains of any variety. But if I had any words of wisdom, I guess it would be to avoid cheap cable chains, especially if they have the U-shaped eyelet to snap in place. They’re just profanity waiting to happen.
If you can find chains that are actual chains, you might find them somewhat easier to put on.
For that matter, if you’re required to pull off to put on chains, chances are there will be some people in snowsuits who are willing to put on your chains for a fee. I’ve never used them, but given the chance again, I’d have to consider it.