The Perils of Pauline

It's hard both to live life and to chronicle it, unless you are a lot more disciplined than I am.  I've spent the past ten days on two major projects:  a surgical strike visit to Fort Wayne, and Christmas.

First, the trip.  Although I originally hadn't planned to go back to the Fort until next spring, I decided to return for a day to see several people.  That meant a 10-hour drive one day, a day of visiting, and then driving back the third day.  Given predicted winter weather conditions, I left early the Wednesday before Christmas to get ahead of the snowstorm.  That worked, and I arrived in Fort Wayne in time for dinner Wednesday night.  My plan was to let the blizzard come through on Thursday, and return to Omaha on Friday when the interstate was clear.  That was my plan, and everything was going well on Friday until I hit western Illinois.  Although it had been overcast with some snow in Fort Wayne, Chicago was clear and dry, and I had my sunglasses on.  Yeah, the future's so bright, I gotta wear shades.

The first sign of potential trouble - what some might call a "clue" - was when I stopped for lunch about 45 miles east of the Iowa border at 2-ish.  West Branch, Iowa (about 50 miles west of the Illinois line), is home to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library which my parents had recommended as worth the stop.  So I thought, hey, I should easily be able to get to West Branch before 4 and could swing by for a quick inspection.  Consulting the Google, just to see how far off the exit it is, I was told 140 miles, 4 hours.  Confused at this obvious mistake, I mapped the distance to my brother's house - that time should have been in the range of 6 or 7 hours, and it was showing more like 9.  Darn Google Maps and their trying to be like Apple, I thought, and pressed on.

It didn't take long to encounter ice and packed snow on Interstate 80.  Nice. The weather itself was dry, but the snow hadn't all been cleared from the day before.  There was about 3/4 of an inch, and usually just in one lane, and that was scary enough.  Of course, Interstate 80 is dominated by tractor-trailer traffic, and the only thing that makes driving on ice more fun is doing so in proximity to extremely large vehicles that bend in the middle.  I started counting cars off the road, and kept a separate tally of semis.

At the Iowa border the condition of the road stopped being frightening, because I was no longer driving.  "Driving" implies movement, and that just wasn't happening.  Obviously I wasn't getting to the Hoover Museum that day (it was about 6 by the time I passed West Branch, although honestly I'd stopped paying attention to the clock at that point).  I hit a couple of rest stops, thoughtfully provided by the taxpayers of Iowa, or someone, every 30 to 40 miles.  (Seriously, the only good thing you can say about driving I-80 across Iowa, even in good weather, is that there are lots of convenient and clean rest stops, with wifi provided by a Fort Wayne company, as a matter of fact.)  One of the stops was staffed by a Very Nice Lady who could only deliver bad news - that the road conditions were no better throughout Iowa.  It was cold, and with no sun (initially from clouds, then from pre-Solistice nightfall), things weren't going to get better for a while.

But I've never been a person to let facts get in the way of a Good Plan.  Sure, I wasn't going to make Omaha by 8 p.m., which had been my original goal, but there was no reason that I couldn't get back that night.  After all, I wasn't drowsy and every mile of progress was, well, a mile of progress, and who wants to spend money on a motel room anyway?  So I pressed on.

Perhaps it was the experience of being stopped on I-80 in Des Moines behind a truck driver putting chains on his tires at 9:15 p.m. - still 140 miles from Omaha - that caused me to decide that discretion was the better part of valor.  In any event, it was around that time that I decided that even though I was two hours from Omaha under optimal conditions, I had no way of knowing the actual road conditions - and so far, "optimal" hadn't been in the cards.  Plus, driving on roads partially covered with snow is worse when you can't see more than 25 feet ahead.  So I stopped at a lovely Hilton Gardens Inn in Johnson or Urbandale or some such place, just outside Des Moines.  (Of course, I had missed the exit with all the cheap motels; such was my punishment for stubbornness.)  My knuckles soon returned to their normal color.

Turns out to have been a good decision.  The rest of Metro Des Moines was as bad as the first part had been, even in daylight - but it was easier to take after a good night's sleep.  Even better, much of the rest of I-80 was clear (and since I could see it, I could take advantage of the good conditions - had I been driving in the dark I would still have been terrified to go a normal highway speed).  It took three hours to get to Omaha (normal conditions would have been under two), and I returned in time to watch one of my nephews play a couple of basketball games in a tournament at Bellevue East High School.

Oh, and the final tally?  Although I stopped keeping a solid count, in the 350 or so miles from western Illinois to Des Moines, there were more than 50 cars and about two dozen semis off the road.  From Des Moines to Omaha, there was about half again that number - including a car on Saturday morning that still had two occupants in it when I saw it in the median.  (I called 911 and they'd already been notified.)

Well, that is harrowing enough for one post.  Stay safe on the roads out there, and I'll fill you in on Christmas later.