Not what my trip home through a blizzard looked like, but an incredible simulation. (Image owned by Lucasfilm, obviously.)
So, continuing on through my battery odyssey . . .
After profiting nothing from visiting nine stores, I had the harmless idea of wasting time at Half Price Books. After all, I’d earned a little carefree time between the failure, the repetition, and the cold. Leisurely taking some in-town streets, I then got back on the interstate and found the right exit. A little more town driving and I arrived.
And it was true timewasting. For I was looking for nothing and bought nothing because I was surprised by nothing.
Surprised by nothing until I left Half Price Books, that is.
As I walked back to my car, it was amazing how much the weather had changed when I was expecting no change at all. Snow was coming down—streaking horizontally, really. Not the most intense snowfall ever, but it was heavy enough. I got out of town, the sky impressively gray and thick in the direction I was leaving as I turned, the kind of winter weather where the world looks like day with reflected city light. I had optimism that the thirty miles home would be a reasonably smooth ride as I got up to many miles per hour and six or more lanes of traffic in each direction.
My optimism was not attacked too much until exiting to a smaller highway. For once I was on another road I was soon unable to drive at a good speed. And then I did not want to . . . for the visibility was just a little better than nothing.
I was driving home, away from the direction in which I’d earlier seen snow piling on, but it was now hitting me from this direction, little points of snow stretching into long streaks and hitting me somehow all straight on, driven by some wind that was literally against me. It remained slow, I was grateful for good vision so I could pick out little hints of other cars and painted stripes on the road which finally curved, and the awfulness began to subside.
Another exit, a smaller two-lane highway, and the snowfall was finally negligible once I was again against the wind. I was grateful that everything had calmed down, that I was only a little slow from a road that was messier than it should have been. Whatever came down was recent, brief, but just enough to make things a mess. But I didn’t care, and had a smile on my face that I could spare a hand to choose different radio stations and hear a silly song like DJ Kool’s “Let Me Clear My Throat.”
I got home, tired from my battery odyssey and just grateful to be home and not be in danger of not getting home, not minding that I completely struck out on finding the battery I needed.
Did I ever find the battery?
The next day my father-in-law called a local car dealer, who had it in stock.
So, praise be to car dealers for having batteries when everyone else is trying and failing to get them at the usual places.
And with that knowledge, I could have avoided my odyssey . . .
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