Been a while...

The title could be taken a couple of ways.
1. It has been a long time since my last post here.
2. Unfortunately it was even longer since my last time on snow.

I am currently up in Hibbing, MN doing required outreach as a part of my last year in dental school. The dentistry is great - I have been seeing more patients than I usually would at the school clinic, and the clinic itself is quite nice. When I learned that I would be heading to Hibbing in December I thought "well at least they will probably have more snow than the metro". Unfortunately I was wrong. So while my wife is shoveling out our house in Red Wing, and the Vakava team is doing intervals on snow in St. Paul, yesterday I was double poling back and forth on a little used road not far from the clinic. At least I was on snow (Hibbing got less than an inch from the storm that buried parts of the Midwest = lots of new "speed grooves" in the rock skis). It had been 5 weeks between time skiing on snow!

Today I tried to drive to Giant's Ridge today to ski under the lights. But as I tried to coast to a stop at a stop light my car started to accelerate on its own! I grabbed the floor mat to make sure it was not caught on the gas pedal, but that was not the problem. I put the car in neutral to see if that solved things, but that just made my car jump to 7000 RPMs (but at least I wasn't accelerating anymore). All I could do was shut the car off and steer to the side of the road. When I tried to start the car it immediately jumped to 4500 RPMs. After getting the number for the towing company from my wife I tried to start the car one last time. After some clanking and grinding the car seemed to be running normally. I had a dilemma. I wanted to ski, but I was 20 miles into a 40 mile trip, and it was probably a lot better to be stranded in Hibbing (where I at least have classmates with cars) than at the Ridge (even if the do have lit trails with some snow). So I aborted my ski for the night and drove back to Hibbing. Fortunately the dental clinic here is one building over from the auto mechanic school at the community college, and they will be able to look at my car tomorrow. Hopefully they can figure out what is going on with my car, because I have 5 pairs of skis in the back, and I am craving getting on some more snow!