Tuesday, March 04, 2014

Survival

My apologies, but the Banished feature (which I'm very excited about) is going to be delayed by a week. We were gone again for hockey last Friday-Sunday--for about the billionth week in a row--and when we got back Sunday night, I realized that trying to write the Banished feature this week was way too ambitious a schedule.

Next week, though. Definitely.

It was 81F in Fort Worth on Saturday at 4 p.m. Twenty-four hours later, as we left town on Sunday, it was 21F. That's right--a 60 degree drop in a twenty-four hour period.

Here's what we drove through on our way back:


That's not snow--it's ice. It was an ice storm with 35MPH winds, blowing across the road like crazy. That picture doesn't really do it justice, because the ice in the sky is lost against the background, but it was completely nuts. Oh, and it was thundering, too. I had no idea "thundersleet" was an actual thing.

The trip back was one of the strangest I've ever had. This storm hit the interstate in stripes. We'd go through five miles like the picture above, then five miles of just wet road with no ice, then thick ice. It was completely bizarre, and it went on like this for about a hundred and twenty miles. So at least fifty miles south of the first picture, we drove through this:


Again, that's not snow. It's all ice.

If you live up north and you're thinking "So what? This is December through March for us!", that's a fair point. But this is the fifth or sixth time it's happened this winter, when we go through plenty of winters where it doesn't even happen once. No snow tires, no knowledge of how to drive in this stuff, and it just keeps coming.

So a three hour trip home took five hours, and we were lucky it only took that long. I've never been so happy to walk in our front door.

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