Home at last

Friday, January 8, 2010

After a long day’s driving, I finally made it home. I didn’t get off to such a good start though. It was still snowing a bit in the roads were messy when I set out in the morning. Worse, when I got to the freeways of Indianapolis, I realized that my washer fluid wasn’t working properly. Turns out the washer fluid I bought further south that was supposedly rated for down to -30 Fahrenheit actually froze in the tubes. Trucks kept spraying me, and there was nowhere to pull off, so I had to keep my wipers on at the fastest speed to clear the windows enough that I could barely see. It was very scary, and it was a relief when I finally got to a place I could get off the road and get some better washer fluid.

I headed north to Fort Wayne and then cut across smaller roads to Toledo and then up to Detroit where I crossed to Windsor on the Ambassador bridge. I’d bought gas before getting to Detroit not realizing that they have a duty-free gas station before the bridge.

It was a relief to be back in Canada, and highway 401 was very clear until I hit the rush-hour traffic of Toronto. Only when I got near Trenton did I start hitting slippery roads again, but after Kingston it was fine.

It was great to be back knowing I had a few days to rest before returning to work and the long drive was over.

Black ice and snow in the south

Thursday, January 7, 2010

I had originally planned to drive across Tennessee through Nashville and Knoxville, but my new plan was to drive directly north as quickly as I could get. The satellite images confirmed that this made sense. Much of the precipitation had already moved east of the route I plan to take, even though there was now snow everywhere around on the ground. The woman in the motel said they rarely get snow there, and when they do, it doesn’t last.

I began driving north, but soon I realized that the roads were covered in black ice. I drove slowly as did other traffic, and at several points it was so bad that I put on my flashing lights and slowed right down. There were many cars in the ditch, and I even passed a few overturned trucks, including one oil truck that had overturned right on the highway. This continued for all while, but the road gradually improved as I got into Missouri. At one rest stop there was an information booth and the woman there had a computer with full weather map information. The sky was blue, but you could see from the map that it was snowing hard just east of there. She said the snow had been falling there up until about an hour earlier. It seemed that by taking the route I did I’d managed to go around the back of the storm.

When I reached Effingham, Illinois, I had to turn eastward, and it didn’t take long until I had driven into the storm. The snow got heavier and heavier, and the roads got worse. When it started to get dark, I thought I’d better stop for the night rather than continue through the storm in the dark. So I got a motel at Cloverdale, Indiana, to the west of Indianapolis.

Toward the approaching storm

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

I was getting concerned by weather reports that showed a winter storm on its way that would move cold weather and snow right down to the Deep South. There didn’t seem to be any route I could take that would avoid the storm. The weather reports seem to suggest however, that Wednesday would be too bad and the worst would hit overnight Wednesday night and Thursday.

At breakfast, at the counter in Denny’s, I got talking to an older man, Frank, who was also heading in roughly the same direction as me. He too was at a loss as to which route to take. He lives in Las Vegas but was taking stuff up to his girlfriend in Pennsylvania in the back of his horse trailer. He asked me where I was from, and when I told him to Canada, he had some of the usual questions that Americans have about Canada, even though he had been to Canada. He wondered if Canada is still part of the British Empire, and I explained in simplified terms are peculiar relationship with the British Crown. The subject then turned to guns, and he wondered if Canada was like Britain in that guns were (according to him) illegal everywhere. I explained as tactfully as I could about Canada’s gun laws and the debate between rural and urban, and pro and con. He asked whether our laws really made any difference to crime, and he expressed the view that if someone was going to invade his house he’d rather be armed to defend himself. I just told him I knew the arguments very well on both sides, and I resisted getting drawn into a debate. He was fine and friendly about it.

I was now just trying to make time with the driving and get as far as I could before the storm hit. I aimed to get to Memphis, and I actually did make it to West Memphis, Arkansas. The weather was clear and the drive pretty uneventful as I drove through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and finally Arkansas.

The storm has still not hit by the time I got to West Memphis, but I watched the forecasts, and checked the weather maps carefully, trying to come up with a plan. The forecasts suggested that arctic air was going to bring it very cold weather and snow to parts of the South that almost never experienced it. I dreaded the idea of trying to drive in snow around people unfamiliar with winter driving and with a winter tires in areas that were not equipped with snow plows. The best plan, I thought, would be to drive straight north toward St. Louis, getting to areas familiar with winter as quickly as I could.