Larry Ditches the Jeep

I know, it really sounds kind of ominous and I think the first thing that most people would picture is a vehicle driving down the road, going out of control and sliding into the ditch. And of course wonder whether there was any damage to the vehicle or if anyone was hurt.

Well, that's not exactly how our vehicle got into the ditch. Jacquie and I had appointments to get our hair cut on Thursday evening, January 12th right after work. After the hair cuts (which cost over $90 freaken dollars) we got into the jeep to drive to the club. Both of us had squash games at 6:15 and it was about 6:12 so we were in a bit of a hurry.

I drove towards the road and all of a sudden, there was a let-down as the jeep slipped into a ditch that was filled with snow. Admittedly, I hadn't taken the same route out of the driveway as I did into it and if I was paying full attention might have thought twice about exiting the way I did.
At first I thought, no problem, I will just put the jeep into 4 wheel drive low and drive out. Wrong choice!! As we got further into the ditch it got deeper and then the jeep was really stuck. We rocked it back and forth to no avail.

There was a young Inuit lad that was walking by and offered to help. We noticed he had no gloves and no hat. He simply said that he was used to it. The temperature was -28C and we just couldn't understand how he was able to stand the cold.

Jacquie tried driving and the young lad and I tried pushing, again with no result. We borrowed a shovel from the hair salon and tried shovelling the jeep out which helped since we were able to move it around in the ditch a bit, however couldn't seem to get it out. At one point I had the jeep on a very precarious angle with only 2 wheels on the ground. Jacquie went down to a garage that was just down the street to see if they had a 4X4 and a tow rope. There was no one there. We called the cab companies since we were told that they had a 4 wheel drive vehicle with a tow rope to remove their cars from the ditch. We were both getting a little frustrated and my feet were freezing. We had a bit of a break to get warm in the hair place and then went back at it. At this point we had been in the ditch for about 40 minutes. We were considering options like leaving the jeep there and taking a cab home to come back in the morning to try again. We assumed the towing company would be at work then.

We were just about to give it one more try, when all of a sudden a van with 6 or 7 strapping young guys stopped by. They got out and had the jeep pushed out of the ditch in less than a minute. You have never seen 2 more appreciative people in your whole life. We were very grateful that the guys stopped to help us!! We were also very grateful to the young guy who hung in there until the job was done.

There was no lasting damage to the jeep and only a few sore muscles on Jacquie and I from shovelling and pushing.