tonyandkirsten.org

We’ve had the Ody about a month now, and I have been fortunate enough to always be able to find a place to park where I could pull in driving forward fairly near our house. The Ody is great overall, but it has the turning radius the size of a small house. A three point turn on a normal street seems like an impossibility. I could barely parallel park the Volvo, so parallel parking the Ody has seemed like an impossible task.

Tony is gone to a men’s retreat tonight, and so the kids and I went to have dinner and play with some friends at their house. When we got back, there were no obviously large enough places to park within a half a block. I circled a couple times and made a half-hearted try and a couple spots, but nothing looked big enough for me with my non-existent parallel parking skills.

Then I had a brilliant idea — I would just pull the car around and park in the off street parking behind our house! We usually never park there, because it involves going through three locked doors, while coming the the front involves one locked door. It isn’t extremely well lit back there, so I didn’t notice how high the snow really was…until I drove into it and promptly got stuck.

You would think I would know better since I have lived in a snowy climate my whole life, but I just wasn’t thinking very clearly at 8:30pm when I just really wanted to get inside and get my kids to bed. I rocked the car back and forth a little bit, but the tires mostly only spun. I knew that I probably needed a shovel and maybe some ice melting salt to get the car unstuck…but I also had two tired kids in the car that needed to get inside… and I didn’t think I could shovel it out very fast by myself.

The day was saved by our downstairs neighbor. We all went inside and knocked on Michael’s door downstairs. He was home, and came out to shovel the car out while I brought the kids inside, and he even pulled it around front and got it into one of the parking spots that I gave up on. I felt pretty silly making such a dumb winter driving mistake, but at least the problem was solved and the kids got to bed before it got too late. Maybe I need to find a way to practice my parallel parking skills in the Ody (or be willing to park way down the block!)