A strange day

Ryan K and I had made plans to go skiing at Huron Meadows near Brighton today. The wind had been gusting at 30 mph all morning, and the temperature was a cold 10 degrees, but we decided to go for it.

I picked Ryan up at 1 pm, and we headed up Main Street and out of the city. We'd barely merged onto M14, however, when the steering wheel started wobbling and the skis and poles started rattling around like crazy. Had the car's tires turned into ellipsis? We stopped in at a gas station, and I kicked huge chunks of snow and slush out of the wheel wells, thinking the icy buildup was perhaps interfering with the tires. But back on the freeway the wobble returned. So we turned around and swapped my car for Ryan's.

We stopped in at Independence Lake county park on the way up, as I'd read that they groom for skate skiing, but the place was deserted, and we didn't see any evidence of skate grooming. So we kept on to Huron Meadows. It was brutally cold and windy, and snow drifts had covered much of the trail. We skied back and forth on a wooded section of trail several times, soon realizing that we'd picked the worst possible day to go skiing. Ryan's fingers were starting to freeze, so he headed inside to warm up, while I skied for another 20 minutes or so.

When I got back to the chalet (i.e., the golf course clubhouse) Ryan bought me a hot cocoa and then proceeded to tell me, nonchalantly, that he'd fainted and fallen while I was gone! He'd been warming himself by the fire, then started toward a table, and the next thing he knows he's hitting the floor. Must have been a bad head rush, brought on by the strenuous exercise and/or temperature changes, because he was perfectly fine by the time I got back.

We drove back to Ann Arbor, with me at the wheel just in case, and parted ways. I took my car to the carwash peaked underneath. Sure enough, there was quite a bit of ice and slush packed into the backsides of all four rims, probably from plowing through snow all weekend. So I blasted the rims from underneath with the high-pressure water gun. Back on the freeway, the wobble was still there, so I returned to the carwash, and blasted the rims some more. This time it worked. The wobble was gone! Amazing that just 1-2 cubic feet of snow could throw the wheel balance of so much.