Icy, Slick & Snowy

Ok - that's two trips in two weeks that have gone a LOT longer than they should have! I mean, what is the deal?

Look at what we're sitting in here - SNOW and lots of it. Not only that, but ice came down and kept on a comin. Oh my goodness was it icy!

Ok, here's the story.

We left about 1am for Olney, IL. It took us 45 min to get our truck out of the safety lane and we spent the better part of 30 minutes looking at the weather and other routes to get us where we needed to go. Nothing was looking good. On the weather channel the 'pink' area was right over where we were headed.

So we left and got to Nashville at 3:30am and shut down at a truck stop. I had to 'blind-side' back into the last parking spot there, which is why it was probably open, it was tough. (Blind side backing is backing in on the right side of a truck - there's a point where the end of the trailer completely disappears in the mirror and you hope you set it up right and it's going in the right spot without hitting anything else.)

We shut down for 4 hours, till daylight, and left. 10 minutes on the road and I start seeing ice in trees and grass. A few cars off the road in the medians here and there. We made a good decision to stop.

(Look at the pretty icecicles hanging from the visor of our truck.) The interesting thing was another 30 miles farther and the roads got bad. What should have taken me 6 hours to get too took 8 1/2 hours. Oy vai - some of the roads were really, REALLY bad. We unloaded at that first drop and headed to our next one in Carterville. 82 miles, a 90 minute drive took almost 3. We got empty at 10pm and shut it down at an old Wal-mart in Marion just across from the truck stop. Dozens of trucks already stopped there, we had to the roads were just too icy to continue - especially with an empty trailer.

We got up this morning to head home and with the 4 inches of ice and snow we were on already, another 3 or 4 fell during the night. We couldn't move. So I threw some salt down, didn't help. My partner tried chipping away at the ice and snow - nothing. So we threw on the snow chains. That is NOT a fun job on a semi-truck. Those chains are heavy.

Got the chains on and was able to get out of the thick stuff onto a snow packed road. Had to stop and bang on the brake drum on one of our trailer wheels that froze up. Finally, we put the chains up and headed home.

Saw some beauty on the way home with the ice in the trees all bowing down and what not. HATED driving in it, but made it safely.

My partner and I turned our typical 20 our trip in to a 41 hour trip.

I'm glad to be home!