Awful Morning, Great Afternoon

Right before I was about the leave with the girls to school/work, it started snowing. A quick check of the weather and the school cancellation message and we got confirmation that school was in fact on. The snow appeared to only be relatively light, ending around lunch time, so off we went.

As it turned out, the snow was pretty much exactly the worst kind of snow to be driving in. Light enough to mean that everyone was out on the roads but still heavy enough to cause cars to be sliding everywhere. There were accidents all over the place and the commute, normally 40 minutes, was still in progress at the 2 hour mark.

At this point I was approaching the exit from our last main road, and noticed that a lot of cars were getting onto the shoulder of the road to get up to the exit ramp (the main lanes were pretty much stopped at this point). I decided to also try this and it was going well, making some more progress when suddenly someone decided to try to cut in front of me. Of course, there was a lot more snow on the shoulder and there was no way I was going to be able to stop in time...so I had to hope that I could slow down a little and that they would accelerate away. Naturally, their cunning plan in the icy conditions was to cut in front of me, then stop...so at about 15 mph (I guess) I ran up the back of the car.

Massive shout out here for the Honda manufacturing process, particularly the Japanese bloke who designed their bumpers...the only damage to my car was to the licence plate cover - literally. The woman in front had a few small scratches on her bumper. As part of my continuing need to educate humanity, I threw out a comment - "Are you serious cutting in front like that in this weather?", she then yelled back something about me driving on the shoulder...the same shoulder that she was driving on when she cut in front of me. I could have continued by showing her the lack of logic in her comment but thought better of it.

I said that I was happy to simply drive on if she was happy to do it. If we wanted to wait for the police, we would literally have been there for hours so everything worked out OK.

I managed to crawl up to the exit ramp, then saw there were 3 cars smashed up there so despite only being a few miles from our destination, figured that there was no guarantee it would have been a short trip. I then took another exit and looped back around and headed home, arriving back 3 hours after leaving. The girls were happy to get a snow day and I got some stuff done in the afternoon, so it all ended up being OK. Working from home in comfortable clothes near a fire beats going into the office any day!