Slippery road conditions!

Road so slippery you can skate on it On the last day of 2002, at my parents for Christmas, we had quite a bit of freezing rain. So much, in fact that the gravel road was one smooth sheet of ice, with not so much as a pebble protruding through it.

I thought this would be a good skating surface, but unfortunately, hadn't anticipated this weather so hadn't brought my skates along. But my sister Marlene had a pair of old skates at my parents. So she set out to try the road for skating.

Marlene says it wasn't the best skating surface, although personally, it seemed like a much better surface than the Rideau Canal is half the time.

A friend, Andy Roberts was visiting, and he decided to try skating with his car a little bit. With the snow banks on either side, there wasn't any real danger of ending up in the ditch.

This page is also my first attempt at embedding a Youtube video. here's a video I took of the event. The digicam I had at the time didn't have terribly high video quality - so the low res is my fault, not Youtube's.

The icy surface is actually not that bad to drive on, as long as you don't need to accelerate rapidly, go up steep hills, or come to sudden stops. The road crew had at this point already sanded the ice near the driveways, so people could actually stop to turn off! No sand in between though. No point in wasting extra sand!

Very icy road

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