Midnight Rum Running

Actually, it is midnight wine running. If it involved rum, the following would have been unnecessary.

Since Speedy had to go back into the shop to get another sensor replaced, we left it at Good Brothers Dodge overnight as snow was predicted. As I was getting ready to call it a night, I checked the weather forecast. It indicated that the tempertures would fall into the teens overnight. Then I went to bed.

Just as I got under the covers, it occurred to me that the overnight lows might be a bit close to the freezing point of wine. We had about a dozen bottles of red wine stored aboard Speedy, along with a case of seltzer, a case of boxed milk and several other bottles of various foods. So, I got out of bed to look up the frezzing point of wine ... 22° F. Oops!

I woke Ellen to tell her that I was going over to Speedy (two towns away in Weymouth) to get the wine and other liquids. An energetic discussion ensued as to whether this was really necessary to do after midnight in a snow storm (6-9 inches had been predicted overnight and it had started snowing a couple of hours earlier). It was finally agreed that the consquences of a broken bottle or more of red wine inside of Speedy was worth the risk of going out in the storm. Besides, we have our new AWD Subaru for snow.

So, off we went to liberate the wine, seltzer, milk and other items in glass bottles ... after midnight ... in a car dealer's lot. It turned out that the storm was a bust. It had already stopped snowing and there was less than an inch of fluffy snow on the ground and all the roads had been salted and were just wet. The Good Brothers lot was lit up like a stadium, Speedy was in the back and all the cops in Weymouth were at the Dunkin Donuts up the street on Route 18.

The temperture did drop into the teens overnight but not a drop of wine was spilled. What's more we were back in our warm bed by 2:00 AM ...

The downstream oxygen sensor in Speedy was replaced and there seem to be no more problems. So it is back in Cohasset, ready to be reloaded. The discussion now was when to actually leave.

Looking at the weather, there will be no warming days this week and it is going to be cold all the way to North Carolina. My opinion is to leave on Wednesday, as it is not going to get any better until after the weekend and predictions that far out are not very accurate. We might spend one cold night in Speedy, but we'd be out of the cold by Thursday. Ellen needed some convincing. But it looks like we are leaving in the morning.