It took me three and a half hours to drive home from town yesterday evening (about 15 miles). Tucker had a doctor's appointment at 4 pm, squeezed in before the snow was supposed to start at 8 or so. I stupidly took my Civic instead of Austin's truck, not even considering that it could be a problem.
Oh, how wrong I was.
When we left the doctor's at 4:50 pm with prescriptions for amoxycilin and oral prednisone, I was surprised that my car was already covered with snow and that it was falling fast. I called the pharmacy where we live to make sure it was going to stay open for two more hours, and hit the roads. The main road to the Western part of the county was impassable. All the roads around here are hilly, there are about 40 plows for the whole county, no one knows how to drive in the snow, no one has snow tires, and there are few 4WD vehicles.
It was horrible. The guy in front of me for awhile was in a cute little rear wheel drive sports car that needed to be pushed up each hill, and fishtailed down each hill until he finally did a 180 into the other lane and I passed him. The accidents were so bad that it took me two hours to go 0.3 of a mile.
Keep in mind I had a sick toddler in the back who kept asking to go night night and to wake ducky. For about an hour all he said was "Tucker hold Mama," just pleading with me to hold him. Sad. The best I could do was hold his hand from the front seat.
Unfortunately, the only alternative route was not an alternative because it was full of accidents, and I didn't know if my car could make it on the back road to it, anyway. My Civic doesn't drive great in the snow without snow tires, especially doing the start-and-stop driving that I was doing last night. Going up hills is much harder when you don't have any momentum.
So we just sat, and sat, and sat, completely stranded. There was an accident up ahead, so Austin couldn't get to us. Finally they were able to clear one lane, and a plow came. Phew. Home free, right?
Unfortunately, by this time there was already about 7 inches on the ground, and they hadn't plowed the secondary road to our house at all. Could my Civic do 3.5 unplowed miles of 7"+ deep snow?
Answer: no.
I got stuck half-way up a hill, about 3 miles from home. Austin came to get us in his truck, and we tried to tow my car up the hill. Unfortunately, the whole plastic bumper/front end got ripped away by the tow chain during our first try. Our second try it flat out didn't work. We backed the car to the side of the road, and abandoned it until the storm is over. Poor car.
We walked in the door at 8:20 last night, no prescriptions in hand and no way to get them. This morning the situation isn't any better. We have gotten 23inches so far, and it's still falling at 1-2 inches an hour! On the news, the head of the roads department said they are only plowing about four main roads in the county. That means we'd have to navigate 3.5 miles of 23" deep snow to get out. No four-wheel drive is THAT good!
According to the news, they opened emergency shelters for stranded drivers in our county and the next one over, and hundreds of drivers were stranded overnight on various roads last night. I believe it!!!!
The picture of Austin's truck is all the snow that accumulated after we got in last night. I'm also putting up one of the picnic table, and of Tucker's Cozy Coupe car (whose top we're using to measure our snow total--we measure and then wipe it off every few hours!)
