I could walk five hundred miles (or drive it, I guess)

I put on a lot of miles today, working at Grand Portage. The round trip included ten hours of driving and six hours working at the location. I worked on scheduling and work-related email for another hour after I got home tonight. It is so odd to leave before the sun rises and not get home until long after darkness falls again, but what the heck… it pays the bills, I suppose. The one thing I really dislike about the long trips to the end of the gaming world in Minnesota is that I miss seeing the family at all that day. The two best things about the trip this time of year are that the autumn colors along the North Shore of Lake Superior are breathtaking right now, and that this involved five hundred miles of driving today. That makes this five hundred miles closer to getting new tires on the service truck. The reason I mention that is because on Tuesday, I was driving home from Fortune Bay and it was raining pretty hard. I kept the speed to fifty miles an hour, because the tires have little tread left, and even though the truck is one heavy beast, with that little bit of tread, the truck was still slipping around on the road, like butter in a hot frying pan. (You just pictured melting butter in a pan, didn't you?) Our maintenance company is ridiculously tight-fisted with OUR money, and won’t let me get new tires yet. I think that when I go in for an oil change again, I will be able to finally get new tires. In a way, I don't mind, because I will have brand new tread for the winter. Oh, and I plan to tell them I want A/T tires instead of the cheesy road-tripping crap that is currently on the truck. For the uninitiated (Heather and Mom, this means you), A/T means the tires are all-terrain and have meatier tread. That is useful for Grand Portage trips in the winter.

While I love the scenery along the North Shore, the winter weather can be nuts. I have been on drives to Portage and in the course of twenty miles, it changed from sunny skies and clear roads to white-out blizzard conditions and glare ice, and then back to sunny skies again. Superior is such a big lake; it literally induces its own weather. I personally think that getting two feet of lake-effect snow in one day would rock! Heather would agree with me. Since our lake country winters have yielded the most pathetic snow levels lately, the idea of all that snow sounds like a blast. Besides, Gabriel is getting old enough that he can really begin to appreciate the snow. I want a snowstorm that is hardcore, the kind of storm that keeps you snowed in for two or three days straight. Those were the days!!

Come on. Let it snow!