A Near Death Adventure

Be prepared, I have a lot to say. Hopefully it is somewhat entertaining to you, but this is mostly for my own memory's sake.

Thursday afternoon Matt came home from work around three o'clock, and we headed out on what we thought would be an average road trip to Oklahoma to visit my brother and sister-in law (see above post). Wrong. The planned seven hour trip turned into a twenty hour, near death experience, which I will share with you now in long, dramatic detail.

The trip started out normally enough. Bennett was in his car seat surrounded by a canyon of suitcases, coolers, pack-n-plays, and Sunday suits. He thought it was great fun. Matt and I were eating pizza from Little Caesar's and listening to the fifth Harry Potter book on CD. Things were looking pretty good, but it was not to last. Around Waco, a mere 45 minutes from our home, it started to snow.

Now, let me pause for a moment to explain just how dramatic a thing such as snow is, here in Texas. It's not that it never snows, it's just that nobody ever plans on it snowing, and so when it does happen people are completely unprepared. The roads are not graded for cars and especially semi trucks to make it up anything even close to resembling a hill, and what's more terrifying, to make it safely down. There are no such things as road plows, road salt, red rock, or ice scrapers. Four-wheel drive is rarely heard of here. Snow tires and chains are never mentioned. And as a result of this complete lack of snow preparation, people are left completely to their own devices...and people are not always very smart.

In Waco, cars were going off the road left and right. There was probably about an inch of slushy snow on the ground at this time. I think people were just panicking and over correcting, because it really wasn't that bad. Traffic was pretty slow as a result of this though, and we were a little frustrated since we never went over thirty-five miles per hour until we hit the outskirts of Dallas.

And then it got worse.

If you watch the news at all, you know that Dallas received about twelve inches of snow last weekend. I imagine this is what Armageddon will look like here.

People went crazy. I have never seen so many cars off the road in my life. There was probably one every couple of feet, not even kidding. Police and ambulance lights dotted the darkness, and at one time I could see three different accident scenes while sitting in the same spot. I say, "sitting in the same spot" because we were. For a long, long time. As mentioned above, semi trucks cannot go up snow-covered hills in Texas, and we were behind about thirty of them, all spinning their wheels and not getting anywhere.

At this point, we had finished eating our pizza and I had washed it down with about a liter of Power Aid. Needless to say, I have never had to go to the bathroom that bad in my entire life before. And since we were going nowhere fast, I was getting rather grumpy about it. Finally, Matt cut the top off of one of the Power Aid bottles and...you can guess the rest. I felt much better after that.

We tried to make the best of the situation. Matt got out and walked around a little in the snow (which was very deep by this point. I had to keep reminding myself we were in Texas and not Idaho), and Bennett got to get out of his car set, since I have never heard of a car accident happening at zero miles per hour. And we sang. Here is a small sample of us attempting to keep our sanity.



After sitting in the same spot for over an hour and a half however, even Bennett's cute antics could not entertain us, and we decided it was time to, well, be rude. Since we were hauling almost every tool we owned, we had decided to drive the big, safe, pickup truck from Idaho. Matt shifted that baby into four-wheel drive and started weaving between and honking at anything in our way, be it stopped cars, stuck semi trucks, or people who were going three miles an hour and had no business being on a road covered in snow. Lanes no longer existed at this point. Traffic regulations no longer mattered. Police were not a worry, since they were all occupied with cars off the road, and probably couldn't catch us in their ill-equipped vehicles if they tried. Free at last, free at last!

We were just coming up on the Texas/Oklahoma boarder line when we noticed the temperature on the windshield had dropped to thirty-four degrees...the magic number which equals ice. We had planned on stopping at a hotel just across the boarder anyway, since it was ten o'clock at night by this time, and it was obvious we were not going to make it the remaining distance before sometime in the wee hours of the morning. Bennett was already asleep in the back of the car. We were almost there.

And then it happened.

Even four-wheel drive is not oblivious to ice. We hit a pretty good sized patch going about sixty-five miles per hour, and the back of the truck swung to the right of the road. Matt over corrected, bringing the truck bed clear around to the left and causing us to slide sideways down the highway. The next part is a blur to me, but I know two things. One: that I am SO glad Matt was in the drivers seat, and two: that we are definitely being watched over. We hit the side of the road and dove into the snow, which caused us to swing in almost a full 180. I'm sure we would have either stopped or rolled at this point under normal circumstances, but it just so happened that we were on top of a very steep overpass, and went careening down it sideways. We skid all the way to the bottom, where we hit the ditch which lined the frontage road, and popped up over the top of it and onto the other side. At this point the snow, which was up to the sides of the doors, finally slowed the truck down, but Matt had the foresight to gun it forward and back up onto the frontage road before we got stuck. From there we cruised back onto the highway like nothing happened, except for the fact that I was shaking uncontrollably and Matt was a little in shock. Bennett was still sound asleep in the back, even though he was completely covered in the heavy bags and clothes we had piled around him.

We decided it was probably time to stop for the night, and quickly found a motel room in Denton, Oklahoma, where we all shared a bed and slept in our clothes, not bothering to unpack a single thing.

The next morning we got up and back on the road. Apparently Oklahoma has the good sense to actually keep snow plows on hand, and the going was much smoother from there on out. We passed many, many cars abandoned on the sides of the road, and one semi truck that was completely tipped over sideways. I am just so thankful we were not one of them!

This is the semi that had tipped. I had never seen this before.

I really do love the snow. It's very pretty when it's not trying to kill you.