This year, Mother Nature decided to surprise the Portland area with a ton of snow. It pretty much started on Dec 13th and didn't stop until....well I'm not sure because we were one of the lucky ones who got to leave town for Christmas. I heard they had a lot of snow on Christmas. People were at their wits end due to all the snow. Portland is not ready for 6 inches of snow, let alone a couple of feet. There were not enough plows to clear the roads. The temperature never got above freezing so for two weeks we'd wake up to new snow, the snow packed down during the day, froze overnight, and then it snowed again. The roads were really slick. They were covered so much that ruts started to form in the snow where everyone was driving. I like driving in it, but I wasn't thrilled with other drivers taking it too fast(I had one car coming at me sideways down a two laned road where either he went off the cliff to miss me or I ran into a hillside. Thank goodness he missed me by inches and was able to stop just in time to stop from going off the cliff!) ODOT usually tells everyone to use the buses, but that was hard when the buses were shut down. Brandon was planning on taking the bus to campus to finish his finals. He found out as he was leaving that the buses had stopped running for the day(and it ended up being for the week). The school finally wised up and stayed open a couple of days so he at least was able to drive over and get finals over with. Everything stayed closed as workers couldn't make it in.
All in all, I thought this storm was so much fun! I love having everything covered in snow. The trees were gorgeous. I had to go to work so we chained up Brandon's car and I drove in. I really enjoyed coming home. One road was uphill, and with all the snow frozen over on the roads the ruts in the snow made me stay on the road like a roller coaster track. With being bumped back and forth and the chains on, it truly felt like I was headed up on the Colossus.
We weren't sure if we would be able to leave for Grandma's in Southern Cali. The roads had been so bad on I-5 south, the way we were headed. But we
had to leave on the 23rd. There had been a bad accident they were clearing as we left the house. Traffic was backed up, but once we got on I-5 we didn't move. It took a while but we finally found out that ODOT decided to close I-5 to scrape and de-ice the bad areas. BAD TIMING!!! Everyone was leaving town for Christmas. It took us 5 hours to get to Salem, which normally takes 30 minutes. Our plans to hit Medford at 9 obviously did not happen. We hit snow in the mountains, which we would have missed if we hadn't been stuck on the freeway. 3am we drove into Medford, totally exhausted. Brandon was such a trooper - he drove the whole way, though he tried to talk me into turning around to sleep in our own bed. But we made it safely to Grandma's and had a great time with the Hignites.
