The Road back to Vermont -or- Stick to the Plan: A Lesson

In the early morning mist and fog, with a few residual rain drops dripping here and there, we loaded up the trailer and the 4Runner, and set out on our return voyage. Neither of us were all that excited about it; we had both been craving the rally as an all-to-brief vacation that our sanity depended on. But once the sun came up and the last rain clouds cleared out, it was a rather pleasant drive through the Carolinas.

We had been warned that we  might not make it home. As early as Friday night some of the rally racers were getting calls from their wives who wished they'd come home. How dare they leave them alone with the house when there were three feet of snow predicted? How could they?

Jen had spoken with friends in Asheville and found that it was snowed in, and warned us to check online to make sure the highway was open through D.C. I tried to do this, but all I found was a series of links that brought me full circle back to the original webpage without actually giving me any information. So we just kept going, and noticed with growing pleasure the rising piles of snow on the sides of the roads as we sped through Virginia. We weren't really worried. We assumed that all the hullabaloo was caused by people who don't know how to drive in the snow and usually don't have to. We drive in snow all the time. We drive after receiving immense droppings of snow on a regular basis (every year except this year)!

What we hadn't thought of was that the same people who don't know how to drive in three feet of snow also don't have the slightest idea how to clear three feet of snow off the road.

Very abruptly, as though we had crossed some kind of county or city line the road was pocked with several inches of snowy ice slush that had been compacted to form driving surface worse than any dirt road I have ever driven on. When the Car-Pool lanes began they were closed, and we noticed workers aiming heaters out of their trucks at the barriers, which were frozen in the down position. We laughed. It was surprising how bumpy several inch deep ice holes all over the rode made the ride. Traffic had slowed to a crawl. I stared out the window at the road, trying to discern how it got that way in the first place. The road was like a river. Dirty, muddy water was rushing over the top of the ice-field, down the hill. I looked to the side of the road, which was downhill, and noticed water piling up against the concrete barriers on the side, creating a REAL river going in the downhill direction. Even when the concrete barriers were no longer there, where the water normally could have run into the grass, the piles of snow on the side of the road were creating their own barrier and the water had nowhere to go but down. This culminated when we came to an overpass that happened to be at the bottom of two hills: water was accumulating quite quickly, and apparently there was no drainage on the overpass. (?? really? This place was a swamp originally, seems like they would have built with drainage in mind). We drove through six to eight inches of water, and noticed that the bridge was slightly off camber, and the people on the right side were driving through MUCH deeper water. Hmmm.

After three hours of watching people drive like idiots, we made it through DC. When we reached Baltimore there seemed to be more snow on the sides of the roads, but the roads themselves were perfectly clear. How southern Virginia and Maryland can figure out how to clear the streets but Washington DC can't will never make sense to me. Most things in Washington don't make sense to me though, so I guess this was just par for the course.

Things went on nicely after that, until we reached the New Jersey Turnpike and Seth started complaining about the outrageous tolls. He had driven most of the way so far and the DC drivers had left him in a particularly foul mood. We looked at the maps and decided to get off the turnpike and take a parallel road up to the last possible exit to minimize cash loss. This would have been fine if we stuck to the plan, but instead we made last minute decision to get back on the highway sooner and ended up going the wrong way. Then we had to get off (toll) and get back on and go most of the way we had come on the side road, which meant we still had a big toll, and had wasted almost two hours. Oy. If we had stuck to the original plan, of taking the turnpike, we would have been better off. If we had stuck to the secondary plan of getting back on at the specified exit, we would have been better off. But we are stubborn and didn't do any of these things.

The rest of the trip was unpleasant, dark and hungry. We didn't want to stop because we just wanted to get home. (at least we wanted to get home now!)

We finally did make it home around 3:30 am. We will see if we learned our lesson.

And that's all I have to say about that.