So I thought I'd bring Icarus along with us yesterday when we went to take DH/DP to his echocardiogram which is at a hospital 2 hrs away from us normally even with congestion. You can stop laughing now. We were driving through that there and back.

I had to wait until dawn before I could read the chart clearly enough to start knitting Icarus. As soon as it did get light enough for me to read it, I started to work while DH drove like a man possessed to keep us safe. We diverted south for a bit and took a secondary bridge over just to avoid the Port Mann cause it was backed up to at least 208 if not further east. We got him to Lions Gate just before 9am. His appointment was for 8am and normally, two hours is enough time for us to get there even if we have to divert around congestion. We had left at 6 am.

Then, when I go to drive off, I reach up to adjust the rear view mirror and the frelling thing breaks off. The glue failed!

So, here I am, driving around the North Shore, looking for the nearest dealership - which I never find - without a rear view, feeling oh-so-blind, with three kids in the back seats, praying I don't get hit because we had left our insurance papers for the van at home in Dh's other jacket.

I finally take the kids to Capilano Mall, drag out the wagon to pull DD around, stick D2 in my sling and spend the next half hour to hour praying I don't run over DS with the wagon because he's doing the "jump over the handle, slid under the handle" game in Walmart. I buy some yarn, grab some extra money, and then head to "go bananas" to wait for DH to show up.

Sometime after 11, he finally shows. He thinks they may have spotted something on his echo cause of the talk between the teacher and trainee.

Anyway, from there, I showed him the broken off mirror and DH rolls his eyes. We head from there to our doctor's office in Caulfield, buy a reprint of our insurance papers just-to-be-safe and I buy a replacement map for the van and we head to Horseshoebay to see if our friend is there cause his phone was dead and we wanted to hole up somewhere for a bit. I suggested a couple of alternative friends too, but noooo... the kids want to see that one. We drive past the line of cars trying to get on the 99 north and into HSB, right into our friend's parking lot and lo and behold, not only is the power out, so is our friend. His car is GONE.

So we head back east. As soon as we hit the highway, the radio says (love News1130!!!) to stay off the no 1 between Abbotsford and West Vancouver cause of fallen trees. Guess which highway we're on? Yup.

We stay on it, slipping into the HOV lane for the trip back, and at 176, we decide to take a secondary route. We see that our gas guage is getting low - I had suggested filling up or at least putting more in earlier. We had to divert along our diversion route twice because of blocked roads. I'm glad we had a map with us!

In Abbotsford, we fueled up and I made sure we had a full tank.

Took us easily four hours to get home. And I'm glad I got that reprint of our insurance just in case. It kept us from getting in an accident! Lights were out all over the place. Trees were done. There were several places where we saw instead of the highways crews removing the trees, they had just chainsawed off the worst of it to get the traffic moving again. We saw one car had been hit by a tree, several accidents, and even a consumer trailer tossed to the side like a toy. At least the small truck towing it hadn't flipped. There was also reports all over the place of more insanity and accidents. Places were flooded too.

So I knit there and knit back and pumped milk on the road for D2. DS fed her, the good boy. We were home shortly after 5pm. By 8pm, I was out cold cause I didn't get much sleep the night before either. To top it off, Icarus had driven me nuts cause I had made a mistake and couldn't figure out where I had done it. I had put it down because the drive back was too dark to knit following a graph and I couldn't see it either. At home, I had to frog back 4 sets of rows (knit and purl) to fix a mistake I had made! At least I was able to quickly do that once safe at home. DH said that my knitting was keeping me calm which had helped him keep calm for that trip back.

I think I'm going to make an emergency knitting kit for the car, just in case wew were to get stuck on a day like yesterday...