fenchurch | Dec. 23rd, 2006

It's been such a long day. We left Richland, WA a bit later in the morning in the hopes that the sun might melt a lot of the frost and snow on the road, and it worked! There was a bit of slush on the road over Meacham Pass through the Blue Mountains between Pendleton and LaGrande, but that was it! We had a fantastic visit with my mom over lunch, swapped boxes full of presents and headed out again.

The next leg of the trip was fine... bare and wet roads all the way through Boise and beyond, until we hit the junction of I-84 and I-86 in central southern Idaho. Keep in mind, this is the same general area where we had our car accident last year and nature sure seemed determined to throw reminders at us. The roadway turned into a solid sheet of ice: Check. Strong sidewinds: Check. Snow drifting over the freeway: Check. Only this time, with the ever-so-fun addition of being NIGHTTIME. Ugh. We really should have just gotten a hotel room in Burley and finished the drive down in the morning... but there's no way we could have known the roads would be that bad.

We pulled over into a rest area/weigh station that was covered in a thick layer of ice and packed snow, and Rackham ~~ran~~ walked carefully over to the weigh station office to see if he could get an idea of the upcoming conditions. He was told that we'd already been through the worst of it, that the wind stopped not far south of the rest area and that the roads really cleared up after Sweetzer Pass. Turned out, she was right on the money... That first bit of road was some of the most stressful we've ever been on. Every time the car started losing even the slightest bit of traction, it was all we could do to keep from freaking out. I'm SO glad that's over.

And now I'm off to bed, since I'm hoping to go to Curves in the morning, we still need to do a teeny bit of shopping and we've been invited over for Smörgåsbord with