Friday, December 26, 2008

Snow Driving

We left over a week ago to do our Christmas traveling. We checked the weather and decided not to drive all the way to Louisville the first night because they were forecasting freezing rain that afternoon. We’d had about two inches of snow here, but we were sure that wouldn’t be a problem. We’d just stop in St. Louis for the night. It would make for a longer drive the next day, but still get us to Ohio on time.

We pulled out of our driveway onto our snow covered road. As we turned onto the main road it wasn’t any clearer. We chuckled as we saw not one, but two of the city trucks with their plows up. It was just a couple of blocks to the interstate, where surely it would be clear, right? It was only a couple of inches and it hadn’t fallen that fast. Wrong.

The interstate was a mess. We couldn’t see the lines. People were sort of trying to stay in lanes. We decided we would have to turn around, but of course with traffic at a near stand still it took quite some time to get to the next exit. There the road was ever so slightly better and we had ruts to follow, where there was bare pavement. As we crossed into Missouri an amazing thing happened—the lanes had been cleared. We were very grateful for MODOT.

As the day continued our “short trip” to St. Louis took over seven hours, but the roads were improving. We even got caught behind some of those wonderful plows that had cleared the way. They were slow going, so we had to be patient, but we were so grateful for the job they had done.

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