From IKEA to Snow Chain Rackets

Once we had found the mysterious fountain of diesel and our truck had filled up from it's shores, we headed north to Santa Rosa and fixed up another store and then it was off to Sacramento where we decided to stay the night. Of course even finding a place to sleep didn't happen with out a hitch. Ikea in West Sacramento was having a grand opening, and people had traveled from hundreds of miles for this opening. I think we were pretty lucky to find a room that night. ABC News 10 later reported

Nearly 2,000 people turned out Wednesday morning for the 265,000 square-foot store's opening. The West Sacramento location is the 27th U.S. store for the Swedish furniture chain and the first Northern California location outside of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Crazy furniture shoppers (How crazy? Click Here to read just how wild it gets.)

As we worked the stores on both ends of town, we both realized how beautiful Sacramento is. It seemed like a nice, sunny  day and good for driving. By the time late afternoon came around we were on our way east for a nice ride from Sacramento to Reno. At this point I had never heard of a place by the name of Donners Pass and James had never heard of tire chains. We were about to get our education on both in a hurry. As we listened to the weather on the XM radio we began hearing about the 3 ft of snow that had fallen and the signs on the side of the road warned of severe snow pack and that were chains required. We were driving a rental truck and didn’t have chains (most likely since we didn't think about that in Southern California during early March! James was bewildered on how a chain was going to help us navigate in the snow. In his defense he has lived his entire life in southern Florida.

The further up the mountain we drove the darker it became and there was more and more snow on cars coming down the mountain. We finally were made to pull off at a check point and asked if we have chains.

When I told the man no he just replied, “You’re not going any further without them, pull down to that house and buy some.” Pull down to a house and buy chains. James was completely confused now. We pulled down to this house with a sign outside that simply said Chains for Sale. We walked in and we didn’t even have to ask. The old man walked out looked at our truck, looked at the tires. He went back in to the many shelves of Chains in a bag. He dropped a bag in front of us and $90 dollars later we were headed up the mountain. What a racket! That man has to love the winter...he sells snow chains.

Well with the magic chains were allowed to continue are journey up the mountain until we were told the chains had to actually be put on the truck. And don’t you know right on the side of the road there were guys with orange vests on. Any idea what their job was? You are right! give them $30 dollars and they will put the chains on for you. I am telling you these guys love the snow. So now we traveled over Donners Pass.

We went from asphalt to snow pack, back to asphalt where, and I know you will find this hard to believe, there were guys there with orange vests on and for only $20 would take your chains off. Well this is where it stops for me. I am sorry if I hurt the Donners Pass economy that day but I took the chains off myself. No help from James as he found this desire was to pepper me with snowballs the whole time I worked. It must be that people from Florida lose their mind in the snow.