We left south Carolina at noon on Friday, hoping to make good time to Cleveland and arrive before midnight. We saw there was supposed to be bad weather, but assumed it was going to hit after we were farther north. We also turned our nose up a bit because weathermen tend to overexagerate about bad weather in the south. Come on, we're from Wisconsin.
Unfortunately, this time we were wrong. It rained all the way to North Carolina and started snowing around Charlotte. The wind was awful and we pulled off the highway in Dobson, about 10 miles from the Virginia border. Luckily, there was a hotel with rooms available, a Dairy Queen across the parking lot, and a complementary bottle of wine with our stay.
We got about 4 inches of snow, but visibility was zero and North Carolina has no response to snowy or icy roads except to immediately collapse in panic.
We got to the hotel around 5:30. We ate supper in the lobby and let the kids run around like monsters until we started getting dirty looks from other people in the lobby. (Then we were tempted to let our wound up kids run up and down the hallways screaming.)
The kids got to watch a movie before bed and everyone was in bed with lights out by 9. But June didn't want to sleep and kept everyone up with happy yelling and screeching until 10:30.
On Saturday morning, we were dug out of the parking lot and back on the road by 9. We had delusional thoughts that the farther north we got, the better states would be able to handle the after effects of the bad weather. North Carolina was awful. There are no plows in the state and the highway was as rough as driving down someone's driveway packed in snow. In Virginia, we got stuck behind stalled cars and had to sit idle for an hour. But we thought, don't worry, it will get better after this.
Traffic continued moving slowly, which was good because the roads were awful. Mama drove for two hours and she was so tense that her back is still tight from the experience.
We did take time to notice that this was a very pretty snowfall.
It only took us three hours to make it 67 miles across Virginia and we were sure things would pick up in West Virginia. Were we ever wrong. About 50 miles south of Charleston, traffic stopped again. We sat in the same spot on the highway from 4:30pm to 10:30 pm. We honestly thought we'd be spending the whole night on that road.
There was no where to divert traffic. All of the exits were miles away and there is no where to go once you get off the exits. They couldn't even turn traffic around because the southbound lanes were 30 feet away up a hills. So we sat on the highway for 6 hours waiting to move. The good news from the whole experience was that the kids were phenomenal. They didn't cry or whine at all. Granted, they did watch about 20 hours of movies. But we're proud of them for keeping their cool even when we couldn't. And we're glad they managed to subsist of a bag of apples and oranges, a box of cheerios, a 3 pound bag of tortilla chips and some homemade beef jerkey. (We did have more food, but we forgot it in the hotel room after Henry insisted on stashing in the room's refrigerator. Always prepared- that's us.)
When the kids weren't watching videos, they read books or entertained themselves with fun games of "Toss George." It's a lot like it sounds. Neither of the kids were keen on getting out of the car and walking around or even getting out of their car seats.
At 10:30 (about 15 minutes after we fell asleep, of course) snow plows came through and plowed a third lane beside us. Then traffic picked up and we inched our way to Charleston. North of Charleston, the roads cleared up and the traffic disappeared. We wish that the plows would have given us a little longer to sleep, because it took us 10 more hours to get to Cleveland.
Henry slept all the way through to Cleveland and woke up for the last half hour of our drive and got to see the sun rise over Ohio. Brandon got tired and we stopped in a hotel parking lot and slept for 90 minutes close to Marietta. Then he stopped and got some coffee. June woke up at that point and got to enjoy a rare 4:30 am Threee Musketeers candy bar. She held it in her hand for 5 minutes until we had to make her eat it for fear of her smearing melted chocolate all over herself.
We finally made it to Cleveland at 8 am on Sunday morning after a grueling 23 hours in the car. And we made it just as everyone in the house was waking up, so we started straight in on the celebrating.
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