Black Ice

Wednesday morning there was a lot of black ice on the roads going to school. (Pretty hot biking conditions!) Anyways, I know that when it snows in Toyota there are no plows to clear the road, so I assumed there are no gravel trucks either.

How wrong I was. Like I said, I'm on my bike going to work as usual and I see a Japanese "gravel truck." It sadly consisted of two guys standing in the back of a pickup (or small Japanese equivalent) taking turns throwing shovel loads of salt on to the road behind them.

Overall a pretty sad site. But what took the cake was when this "gravel truck" skidded on the ice itself and the two guys in the back wiped out into the pile of salt. 20 minutes later I came across a two car accident in an area where the road had been "gravelled."

There you have it... Japanese "gravel trucks."