I went up to Minnesota for the Super Bowl. Well, not really for the Super Bowl, but more for the activities surrounding the Super Bowl. I can’t afford a ticket to the Super Bowl. I work at the Computer Mine, not Goldman Sachs or some other place populated by white collar criminals.

I thought I’d share a few pictures of Nora from the weekend:

She has the strange quality of getting cuter every time I see her.

I did experience a strange bit of luck on the way back from Minnesota on Monday morning. But the story starts several weeks back.

In early January I put my car in the ditch for the first time in my life. I was running late for my shift at the Computer Mine and was driving a little too fast and hit a slippery spot of road and that was all she wrote. At the time, I thought this was karma catching up to me for years of driving by cars in the ditch and pointing and laughing, but maybe that wasn’t it.

Maybe, just maybe, rather than being punished, I was being warned.

You see, ever since I put my car in the ditch, I’ve been driving slower in wintry conditions. Monday morning, I-35 was just such a set of conditions.

I left Burnsville and heading back to the Cyclone State at about 8:30 or 9 AM or so. The first hour or so out of the Twin Cities the roads weren’t bad and there wasn’t any weather to talk about. I was making good time and I figured that I’d make it back to Ames to starting swinging my pick by about 11:30 or so.

Then when I hit Iowa, the weather started to get a little sketch. The road was still in decent shape, but white out conditions would hit every few minutes. I stopped at the rest area in Dows to drain my bladder and grab a road trippers lunch. Gas station pizza.

I hit the road and the conditions got worse and worse. Due to the white out conditions I slowed way down. Soon I became the slowest car on the road.

When I hit the Story City area the roads got way worse. I was actually beginning to fantasize about not going to the mine at all. Just blowing by and going home. Calling it a day before my day even started.

Then I got to the 13th street exit in Ames. The roads got way worse. Then there was a complete white out. I slowed down to about 15 miles per hour. When I came out of the white out, I saw a scene that looked like the zombie apocalypse. There was about 20 cars in the ditches or the shoulder or facing the wrong way or clearly damaged and driving backwards on the shoulder. There was enough of an opening in the carnage that I was able to skate through and continue on to work.

Once there I saw news stories that the area I had skated through had went from 20 cars to a massive 70 car pile up.

Here is a screen capture from the DOT Camera:

Here is the video (you have to be on the website to watch the video):

The video starts about 5 minutes after I went through this area. You can’t quite make out where the beginning of this pileup starts.

I take from this, that I was very glad that put my car in the ditch a few weeks ago, because my Monday could have ended up being really bad.