It's just been a Winter Wonderland here the past few days.
When Bob took out the trash on Sunday night, he said the driveway was
a sheet of ice--it had been raining lightly, and when the temperature
dropped, it froze. So he told me to be extra careful on Monday morning
when I went to work.
I still probably wouldn't have thought anything of it, but on Monday
morning I was on the computer checking my email before I left for work,
and I got a message from Dan, one of the guys I work with, saying that
he had started out for the office, and the streets were so bad that
he had turned around and gone home.
I waited awhile before starting out, but in my experience, once I
get out there, it's never really as bad as I've feared, and I was
restless--if I'd known I was going to stay home all day, it would
have been fine, but since I didn't have a plan, I thought I might
as well just try it.
It wasn't bad, really, although it took me about twice as long as
it normally does to get to the office, just because I needed to
be careful, and you have to watch out for everyone else . . .
Then, last night, we got the snow. This was my view from the
porch this morning when I got up:
It took me two hours to drive the 20 miles to work, traveling,
for the most part, at speeds that didn't even register on my
speedometer. The highway wasn't bad--it was pretty well cleared
off--but the surface streets were horrible, and the scary part
was worrying about getting stuck on one of them, or not being
able to get up a hill.
The key is to not stop moving, ever, if you can avoid it, so
I tried to hang back and leave plenty of room between me and
the car ahead, so that I could keep crawling and avoid coming
to a complete stop. I succeeded for the most part, and didn't
get stuck anywhere, although there were a few close calls.
I left the office in the middle of the afternoon and came home,
hoping to get a head start, and it didn't take as long to get
home as it did to get there this morning, but most of the roads
were still pretty awful. I'd estimate we got about six inches
of snow, and driving through unplowed streets with that much
snow is pretty unnerving.
I got home without incident, but couldn't get up the driveway,
which is on a slight hill. I didn't want to try too many times
and risk getting stuck completely, so I called Bob (who had
come home early, too) on the cell phone, and he came in and
drove into the garage for me.
I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. The snow plows
finally made it to our street, and our subdivision is supposed
to have someone plow the driveways, too, but I haven't looked
to see if ours has been cleared (it's in the back of the house).
Getting to work tomorrow morning could be very interesting.
