BACK!

Let me tell you about snow. I know you want to hear all about snow because MY snow story is so much better than everyone else's.

See, a bit more than two weeks ago now we were supposed to drive to Kansas.
Yes, from Washington, D.C.
Why are you looking at me like that?
Anyway, we spend Friday night doing laundry and whatnot. By "we" I mean "Yummy". We've heard tales of impending snow, but it's not going to help to start out Friday night. Saturday morning I get up and, sure enough, it's snowing. I check weather.gov, weather.com, and weatherbonk.com. I find webcams of the highways. There is snow and more coming, but the highways show snow plows, cars, and asphalt. We load up the car, load up the birds, get the birds out of a neighbor's tree, and hit the road.

Apparently, the city of D.C. wasn't having anything to do with these new fangled plow thingies. Why bother moving all that snow when people are just gonna throw it back in the road when they try to get their cars free from that berm that was built around it? We stopped in the street to get coffee (nobody was bothering with parking spots since there weren't any). We hit Georgia Avenue which we were led to believe was clear-ish. It wasn't horrible. The lights were the worst part. And the fact that while the snow was low the road and lanes were poorly defined. As we passed into Bethesda, Maryland we saw that Yummy was right and they were better at clearing snow. We could tell where the edges of the road were.

The Beltway wasn't bad. Apparently, it's more important to be able to drive around and around the city than to actually drive inside the city. We got onto the 270 spur and the road turned back to crap. I hoped that beyond the spur the roads would improve. They didn't. There was no asphalt. There were no plows. There were, however, cars. Had the cars traveled single file we would have had a lane that could do 50 MPH or so. Instead usual 3-4 lanes was acting like 11-12 lanes, each of which maxed out at 30 MPH. We couldn't even turn around and go home because there wasn't an exit that would support traffic for an absurd difference.

We pushed on as long as we did because the snow was supposed to last until Monday. Two days of driving and we'd be in Kansas for the actual holiday and then drive two days back for work.

Fuck.
That.
Noise.

We tried beyond all good sense. Of course, we did that before ever starting the engine.

We found an exit and turned around. Got groceries. Started home.

290 was still crap, but we found a snow plow to follow. Several other cars got in this line. A few decided the plow was moving too slow. We soon found them embedded in the side of the road.
At the spur the plow went right and we went left. The Beltway had vanished under the snow. After sliding around on it for far too long we re-entered the city. Bags of sand left on the side of the road were the only things keeping that single tire width of road clear. No less than a dozen people were seen with ski poles. Most, not all, of them had skis, too. And then, upon getting home we had to dig Yummy IN to her parking space. She still parked at an angle but left room for cars and the mythical abominable snow plow to come past.

We camped for two days and decided to see about getting our weeks switched. We could camp all week OR we could see about going back for the week of New Years. I kinda wish we'd just camped out for the week. It would have been what I've always been told vacations are like. Lacking a snow shovel I used a shrub rake to dig out Yummy's car after the plow passed. And we went to work Monday. Nobody was there. I found one other person in the building. Two weeks later I found out this was because the Government was closed due to the snow. But I figured that's how things were that week and spent the next three days working from home. I still insist I got more done at home.

You'll get the story of the trip soon. Gotta get the photos off the camera first.