Snowmageddon 2010

I survived!

Hey y’all

If you’ve flipped to a news show at some point today, odds are good you’ve seen at least one story on the blizzard that hit the East Coast over the past day and a half. It’s not exactly the type of stuff that would make people from up north flinch, but it ended up setting records in several parts of the Southeast — including being the most snowfall Virginia Beach has gotten since I was born 29 years ago

In other words, after praying for snow on Christmas for most of those 29 years, Mother Nature decided to cooperate on the one year I had to drive back home to Durham the next day

I left Virginia Beach around 10:00am this morning, figuring since the snow wasn’t projected to stop until 3am-ish tonight it’d be better to get out sooner rather than later. The downside in leaving so early was that there had essentially been no plowing or significant road treatment of any kind done on any of the highways between Virginia Beach and Emporia…

…so a leg of the trip that usually takes 1.5 hours ballooned out to 3.25 instead

31mi east of Emporia VA around 12:15pm today

For a stretch I was stuck debating which was worse: (i) the overcompensating pricks in SUVs barreling down the highway at near-full-speed with their headlights off, blazing past me just to later spin out into a ditch, or (ii) the people who acted like they hadn’t seen snow before, crawling along at 5mph and holding up the only lane of traffic

The wind made the whole adventure even more adventurous, with visibility dropped to 50ish yards and occasionally having a full-blown whiteout as the snow falling combined with snow blown off the trees.

To give you an idea of the conditions, I took a couple pictures when I was about 31 miles east of Emporia. The top photo is the view from outside my windshield, and the bottom photo is the view out the passenger side window at the same point. ((The camera doesn’t pick up the powdery snowflakes, so windshield visibility through the camera lens was actually better than with my own eyes ))

Fortunately by the time I got to North Carolina all of the highways were totally cleared, so it only took me about 2 hours to make it the rest of the way home  Kudos to the NCDOT and the various municipal plowing authorities for doing what Virginia didn’t bother to do in a timely fashion

Now I’m here getting everything re-packed to head down to Orlando for Tuesday night’s Champs Sports Bowl featuring my alma mater… where I’m pretty sure there won’t be any snow

Needless to say I’m looking forward to it, so I’m heading to bed — have a great night everybody!

Tags: #fml, 2L, Gotta Be NC, NCSU Wolfpack, TDot's Travels