So, last week I was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, teaching a four-day training course. It just so happened that they had an ice storm come through while I was there. They had about 4-6 inches of solid ice on the ground, followed by another 3-6 inches of snow, all in temperatures below 20 degrees and bone-chilling winds. During the day we got brief drizzles, the sun would come out a little bit, cars would crush snow and ice into slushy puddles, and during the night the whole thing would freeze over again.

Here are three videos of my icecapades:

My rental car became an icecube overnight on Monday, making Tuesday morning “a tad difficult” as my friend Vick would say. I came out of the hotel in the morning to find my car covered in a 2-inch thick sheet of ice. I scraped enough ice off the windshield and the side windows to see enough to drive to the facility. In retrospect I should have simply walked - the training facility was only two blocks away, but there was quite a lot of ice on the ground that made walking tricky, especially in my non-ice-ready shoes.

Well, at the end of the day, when I came out to the parking lot, I found that there had been freezing rain during the day that encased my car in ice AGAIN.

So, here I am trying to just get INTO my rental car:

[video http://www.recklesspassion.com/videos/IcecubeCar.wmv nolink]

Well, after I got in, I grabbed the ice scraper (apparently standard supply on all Avis rental cars in Cedar Rapids) and proceeded to hack off the thick layer of ice. It later turned out that these were the last 3 minutes or so of the ice scraper - just after I turned off the camera I took a hack at the rear window of the car and the ice scraper shattered into two pieces. Here are the last moments of the ice scraper’s usage:

[video http://www.recklesspassion.com/videos/IceHacking.wmv nolink]

When I got back to my hotel, as I slipped and slid my way to the front door, I bumped my head on a low-hanging branch and heard a musical collection of tinkles - turns out the branches of the tree were completely dripped in transparent ice, making them quite stunningly beautiful chimes. On closer examination, I saw that the berries on the branches were so covered in glassy ice that they looked like little glass ornaments!

[video http://www.recklesspassion.com/videos/FrozenTree.wmv nolink]