Waking up the beast on a cold day.  Don’t put your tongue on the stop paddle.

There is a lot more to being a school bus driver than just sitting behind the wheel.   There is also heart disease, obesity, and early-onset diabetes.  But that is entirely another topic to blog about.

February can go either way in Spokane.  You are either on the verge of spring or get a week-long arctic winter blast that makes what Earnest Shackleton did on South Georgia Island look like a cakewalk.  All this cold makes doing the other duties of a bus driver a little more difficult.  

Like trying to wash off the road grit so you can see, but all of the pressure hoses are frozen.  Or taking the trash out on your bus, only to find the dumpster is full because the trash truck can’t get past the giant snow pile that has it frozen in place from when the lot was plowed.  And don’t even start me on trying to top off the tank with diesel in the middle of a dirt and gravel lot with a couple of pumps on a solid sheet of ice.

But I did want to share a brief moment of what it is like to walk onto a bus with a -14 wind chill that has been sitting all weekend.  Even with block heaters they don’t always start.  It is like walking into an icy tomb and hoping it’s not going to be your final resting place.  It was so cold I could hardly talk.

But the real icing on the cake is IF it does start, that old cold diesel sounds like they are going to explode.  And occasionally they do.  A pretty poor video, but I just felt I needed to share the stuff you don’t know us bus drivers get to experience.  Hey, I was even getting a nice little sunrise.

So much more to come.  What until I get a chance to talk about the elementary students I had to transport a couple of years back that made my bus feel like Con Air without the plane?