Let me tell you about my last 24 hours.
I decided several weeks ago that I would take my hubby on a romantic weekend to the mountains for his birthday. We planned on staying here, mainly because it was friendly to our budget, but also because it was so close to Asheville and many fabulous other places. We were giddy with excitement when we left yesterday morning. This was supposed to be our first vacation alone, as husband and wife, in over two and a half years.
Little did we know, when we planned the trip, it would snow this weekend. We started out on our journey optimistically, hoping we would get to our final destination before the weather got too bad. We drove for at least two hours before we saw the first snowflake. It was a tiny, cute snowflake. Then, before we knew it it was raining and sleeting more than it was snowing. The roads got slushy, but I never thought or felt like we were in any danger.
After about half an hour driving in slush, the weather changed quickly and it was a beautiful dry snow. It was barely sticking to the side of the road. We were still optimistic, and really excited about staying in the mountains with snow.
Within the next hour, at least two inches of snow collected on the ground, and the road starts to become a little scary. Brad decided not to change lanes on the interstate because the car would slide and it was, um, scary. We called Ridgecrest just to make sure that we will be able to get up the mountain, and Brad starts to say things like "I hope we can make it there!"
We are less than ten miles from our exit when traffic comes to a complete stop. We are barely past the last exit before the exit that we are supposed to get off of, and we we are about 50 yards from being off of the bridge. I'm still hopeful that we will make it. In the last few miles we had seen at least a dozen cars that had slid off the road, and I just assumed that traffic was stopped because they were trying to maneuver around other stranded vehicles.
Mr. Man in the Black Coat was a local who felt the need to walk up and down the highway to inform people what was going on. He told us that a tractor trailer had flipped a few miles up. He also told us that we were at the bottom of Black Mountain, and our destination was at the top of the mountain. Still hopeful though...
We sit in the car, and I decide to take some pictures. One hour passes...
Brad starts calling his father who lives in a neighboring town to see if he could find out any information for us. I start calling friends to google the closest hotel. None of the cars have move an inch, and snow is really starting to cover the car. Also, another two inches has collected on the ground.
Before long, I can't even see out of the windshield. (If you notice on our GPS, we only have 6.4 miles to go!)
Finally Brad decides that we need to move to Plan B, because we are quickly realizing that we might have to spend the night on the interstate. About 5 cars in front of us can't go anywhere because the cars are too close to each other because of the on-ramp. About 5 cars behind us are stuck on the bridge. We've been sitting there for about 2 hours now.
I convince Brad that we might have a chance to escape if we ride in the emergency lane and go up (the wrong way) the on-ramp. It was risky, but we had seen two cars already do it. When I say cars, I mean an F-250, and an SUV had risked driving in almost 5 inches of snow. We decided the risk of getting stuck, and possibly rolling down a hill looked better than spending the night on the interstate. We also were running very low on gas.
We did it, and we made it. We were able to pull into a nasty little gas station that had a name like Fred's Fast Fill-up. Brad started to pump gas, while I went to get in line for the bathroom, which by the way, was wrapped around the store. Before I could make it to the bathroom, Brad had to come get me to drive the car while he pushed it back into the parking lot. (Let's count how many times this happens, #1)
We both get back in line for the bathroom. Most of the people that we talk to are still stuck on the interstate, and walked to the gas station. The locals tell us that the hotel (a place called Joppa Lodge) that our friends found us on google, doesn't exist. So we are going to have to go 8 miles back to the next exit to look for another hotel.
We said a little prayer for all of the cars still stuck on the interstate. We said a little prayer that our car could make it only eight more miles.
Brad was really focused.
We had gone about three of the eight miles when things started getting rough. The car started shaking, and Brad had to try really hard to keep it from sliding in a ditch. He didn't have a lot of control over where the car was going. We decided that we had accumulated too much snow on the tires and we needed to get out an scrape the tires. This might be a good time to tell you that I was not dressed to be out in the snow scraping a car.
After using a Wendy's cup to scrape the back windshield, and our bare hands to wipe the tires off, we thought we had done enough to get us five more miles down the road. The car still wouldn't go anywhere, so Brad had to push us to a rolling start and then jump in the car (#2).
We drive the last five miles, only stopping two more times (#3 & #4) to push the car up I-40. Because it is so dark, we can't see anything, so we pull into a much cleaner, and well-lit gas station, only to find out that there is no hotel anywhere on this exit. We are close to Brad's dad's house, but we would have to drive on several rural mountain roads to get there.
I wish you could have seen the fear in our eyes. I have never been more scared in my life. We barely made it to this exit, and our three remaining options were to try to make it to Brad's dad's house (we knew that wouldn't happen), try to go to the next exit because we were told there definitely was a hotel there, or sleep at the gas station. In a moment of insanity, we decided three more miles up I-40 couldn't be much worse than what we had just been through.
In those three miles, we had to push the car two more times. (#5 & #6) The snow was coming down so hard at this point we couldn't see anything in front of us. We took a guess at where the exit was, and prayed we were right. We came very close to driving in a ditch because we couldn't tell where the road was, but fortunately the hotel was immediately off of the exit. We pulled into the hotel parking lot just enough so the rear of our car wasn't sticking out in the road. The snow was so thick, we couldn't go anywhere else.
Brad went inside the lobby to see if there was any room in the Inn. There was a line over half an hour long just to get a room. After a lot of waiting and nerve-wrecking moments, we finally had a hotel room. We didn't have to spend the night on the side of I-40 after all. But our night was still far from over.
Our room was located at the back of the hotel, and there was no way that we could even make it back there. We decided that we should push our car one more time (#7) down the road to a gas station because they would probably scrape that parking lot before they would scrape the hotel parking lot. Brad had to get some help to push the car out into the road, while I drove and let it coast down the hill. I was able to pull the car far enough into the parking lot, and then it slid into a snowdrift.
As Brad was walking down the hill to come get me, I realized that it would be nearly impossible to carry our luggage a quarter of a mile back up the hill to our hotel, so I was trying to decide what we needed to take with us. I figured we could do without our clothes, so we grabbed our toiletry bag, and few other things. It felt like we had to hike up an entire mountain just to make it to the hotel. Brad had to walk in front of me to try to shield me from the snow because it was stinging my face, it was snowing so hard!
We were in the parking lot of the hotel when I had my first breakdown of the night. I was sliding and falling everywhere. I began crying and dropping the bags that I was carrying. Brad had to bring out a little tough love to inspire to keep moving. We were oh so close, and I was so ready to give up.
(This is the view from our room, you can see the gas station down the road.)
We made it to the room, but we didn't think about the fact that we would be soaking wet from hiking in the snow, so I was regretting not bringing a change of clothes. After much deliberating, we decided that Brad would go back out into the blizzard and get his suitcase because we knew that I could wear some of his clothes, but he couldn't wear any of mine. I laid on the bed a cried. When I finally calmed down I started hearing some awful beeping noise. By the time that Brad got back, I realized that our smoke detector battery was dead.
My amazing husband headed back into the blizzard to go to the lobby to see if they could give us another battery. The lobby was so busy and so crazy that he couldn't even get in the door. He came back to the room, and we ate Doritos and gas station hot dogs for dinner.
After another hour, my ears were ringing from the beeping noise every 15 seconds. We called
the front desk to see if they would save our sanity. Within 30 seconds of our call, a very grumpy and unpatriotic (if you know what I mean...) man came busting through the door, ripped the smoke detector off the wall, threw it in a drawer and slammed the door behind him.
We decided that we'd had enough excitement for one day and fell asleep watching Pirates of the Caribbean.
So much for a romantic weekend away with my hubby. I don't know if I've said this in my out-loud voice yet, but I am so ready to say good-bye to 2009!
