driving home

a snowstorm decided to blow through the rockies on sunday/monday, so our drive home took several hours longer than anticipated.  but have no fear, there was never a dull moment.  

we'd been on the road about four minutes before everyone decided they needed to break out their zollinger fruit leather.  you can only see jon and sara's.  but you better believe daniel and i had ours out too.

i'd forgotten about the primary kids singing a mother's day song.  my first time ever to see a kid sing to me in sacrament meeting and i missed it!  glad christopher snuck this shot.  i love it.

we knew that colorado would be bad (i mean, it was snowing when we drove through silverthorne on friday so of course it would be terrible driving back during a snowstorm.  but we thought utah would be free and clear.  it was not.

the pictures weren't capturing how bad the weather was so i thought i'd take a little video.  but then the commentary in the car was just it's typical entertaining mess so i kept recording.  and no one knew it because they all had to keep their eyes on the road (even though we ended up being completely stopped for a full 45 minutes with just that one accident).  we'd been trying to scope out cars that would be helpful to us if we all got stranded.  we didn't have warm blankets but we had a lot of food that would come in handy if we needed to barter.

roads were really bad and semi's weren't handling it well at all.  especially because the wind was also really bad.

this wreck was insane.  two crazy long semis were somehow entangled together and both on their sides.

have you ever seen the underside of an enormous tractor trailer?  i hadn't.

look how long it was!

despite the accidents, the views were spectacular.

and the entertainment was top notch.  since everyone had to look at the road, we all relied on conversation and occasionally some jim gaffigan, brian regan, jeff foxworthy, and jerry seinfeld.  the running commentary about nothing in particular?  that's a little slice of heaven for me.

and then we dropped in elevation and got to drive the speed limit for a while through the no snow areas.  somewhere along our drive we got taco bell... and then later got subway.  both were delicious and neither had beef products smelling like fish... which is more than we can say for the wendy's in beaver that we stopped at on our drive down.

back to the snow.  we'd been checking weather and news and facebook and anything we could get ahold of to try to guess the weather before we actually hit it.  vail pass was closed for five or so hours earlier in the day but opened up by the time we stopped to get gas.  great news!  except that we were terrified it would close again and that we'd be stranded in vail all night.

luckily, the temperature in vail hovered right above freezing and the roads stayed open.

silverthorne, not so much.  the conditions were bad but jon did an excellent job driving and we all laughed and made speculations about the little sports cars that zoomed past us that we would find later down the road going a very humbled 30 sometime mph.

sara and i... happy to have arrived!

and then i drove home.  it took me an hour because the weather and roads kept getting worse as i drove south and parker was way worse than the city.  and i was driving chris's car which is terrible in the snow.  i texted chris when i pulled into the neighborhood.  he texted me five or so minutes later and asked if i'd turned around.

after at least 10 attempts to get up the driveway, i'd had to give up.  the snow on the driveway was so slick that my wheels would skid and then my car would slide back down.  i was soooo close.

but alas.  i had to park on the street and carry my rolling suitcase as i tiptoed up our driveway in my flipflops.

after 15 hours, i was home!  it was a great weekend.