Laura's Cross Country Ski Race report: Kind of...

So, Laura (our sadistic ride leader for our weekend rides) is a cross country ski racer in winter. She was innocently asked; "how was your race this past weekend":

You asked for it.

We left Menlo at 6 pm and arrived in Auburn, where we always stop for gas, in record time.... only to find that 80 was still closed (since 1:30pm!) due to the 45 car pile-up and jack-knifed truck that was hauling liquid hydrogen. It was storming and rumored that 80 would stay shut all night. All motels in Auburn were booked, so we thought maybe we could sneak around via Nevada City and Hwy 20. So drove the extra 30 miles only to find out that it had just closed too. So we resume the motel search and hear repeatedly that everything is booked between Nevada City to Auburn to Roseville, so we better go back to Sacramento (!) So we go back to Auburn to refuel again, and decide to just hide in the van in the neighboring truckers lot! I had my iPad so checked the CalTrans website every so often. At 1:30am, 80 reopens.

So we head up the hill, slow going with chain control the whole way. We arrive at the cabin on Donner Lake at 3:45 am... only to find that our driveway plow guy hadn't come by that night! It took us an hour to shovel the 3' cement-like snow "berm" by the street, as well as the lighter 2' of snow in the driveway to get the van off the street and to get us into the cabin. At 5am it's finally time to call it a night. (I'm always up at about 4:45am midweek to start the day, so it was a loooong day.)

Saturday storms all day, and we pick up our race numbers up at Royal Gorge and ski for all of 30 minutes. The Gold Rush is a 45km race (marathon distance) so we didn't want to overextend on Saturday. (Plus, the weather was abysmal.) We go back to the cabin and spend much of the afternoon shivering out on the deck and preparing our skis with expensive race-wax and fluorocarbons.

Suddenly it's Sunday, and we're back up at 5am and cant even see the van under all the snow that fell overnight. So madly start shoveling, then suddenly realize that 80 has re-closed. Then Mark throws his back out during the shoveling. 80 doesn't open, so the race gets cancelled (partly due to nobody being able to get to the race, and partly due to too much snow to be able to deal with.) There is so much snow that it completely fills in between the side of Mark's van (all the way to the top of the van) and the side of the driveway.

At 4 pm or so, 80 suddenly reopens. (For the 2nd time of the weekend, it was closed for 12 hours straight.) We frantically clean the cabin and close it up, and then frantically shovel again because our plow guy is still apparently MIA.

We finally escape at about 6:15 pm. It's still storming out, and the road is incredibly bumpy... so we thought. We drive up the Donner Lake interchange, get to the chain control guy at 80, and he says "don't you know you have a flat tire???!!!" We never felt it, nor saw it, because of the snow drift in the driveway!

We pull over, unload nearly the entire van to get to the spare tire (and it's STILL storming out), and end up getting the jack totally stuck under the van. It was very cold and windy, and not particularly easygoing since we're stuck on ice and lots of new snow. To make a long story ever-so-slightly shorter, we FINALLY got on 80 at 9pm Sunday night, and arrived home at 2am.

Oh, the things we do for fun.