8 Hours

That's how long it took me to get home from work last night, a distance of 50 miles.

Yes, EIGHT HOURS.

We had a blizzard yesterday dumping about 2 inches per hour on New England. I left work at 1 PM, as soon as the flakes started falling. I got home at 9 PM.

Because of the speed of the snow and the fact that there were so many cars on the road, no plows or salt trucks could get through. So not only was the traffic bad, but the highway (I-95 to be exact) was covered in snow and the street was littered with cars mired in snow and unable to get out. I have to give kudos to my little Elantra who got through it all, even though she slid around quite a bit and at two points I really did think we were stuck. But we got out of it.

2 hours in, I stopped at a service area to get some lunch. The service area was 6 exits down from where I started. Yeah. That was when I started to realize how bad it really was.

The first hour I was really, really angry at the whole thing. The second hour I was resigned. The third hour I got a little angry again, but by the fourth hour my attitude was pretty good. Last weekend I downloaded a bunch of podcasts of Agatha Christie mysteries, so those kept me entertained the whole way. A good story is a good distraction.

By the time I got home, I was starting to feel a little hysterical. After I passed the halfway point of my drive, it got much better. Visibility was down but there weren't as many cars and I was moving along at about 25 miles per hour, which felt absolutely decadent. However, right before the Massachusetts state line all of a sudden traffic stopped. As I passed exit 2 and then exit 1, I started to realize why. I passed at least 3 cars and an 18-wheeler stuck in the snow and parked in the middle of the highway. I thought I would be home by 7, but by 8 it had taken me an hour to go about a mile and a half. I figured that there must be a hundred more cars littering the highway ahead of me and blocking us all. My exit was several miles away.

So I called Jason, told him where I was and asked him to find me a way home off the highway. The side roads were not well plowed yet, but there were hardly any cars out and I made my way through Pawtucket into Providence at a good speed. Thanks to a turned sign, I wound up on the wrong street, tried to turn around, and got seriously stuck. I wiggled around, turned my steering wheel and finally got unstuck, although the smell of burned rubber makes me wonder if I hurt my car. Then I got behind a plow and the plow stopped and the guy waved me around to which I thought, Are you crazy, I can't climb that mountain of snow. But I did.

After all of that, two hours from when I thought I would be home at the worst moments, getting stuck and lost on the back roads of Pawtucket, I was close to tears.

And I think that pretty much counts as one of the worst commutes ever for me and everyone else who was stuck in it. Thinking about it now, it feels completely surreal. How could I have been stuck in traffic for 8 hours?! As Jason pointed out last night, I could have driven to DC in that time.

Yesterday was one of the better days to be married, I have to say. Jason called me consistently throughout my ordeal, offering encouraging words and mapping out a new route from the highway so I could get off the parking lot that was I-95 coming into Providence. He shoveled me out a place to park. He had yummy warm soup waiting for me that he and our friend Matt trekked out into the snow to pick up for all of us. And finally, he gave me a huge hug when I got home and told me it was okay to cry - which I didn't really, even though I felt like it.

Observation: BMW drivers are big jerks! I'm sorry if anyone who owns a BMW reads this, but I stand by my statement. Let me illustrate. There was a sense of camaraderie in our misery. Everyone on the road yesterday encouraged each other and was patient as people jumped out to clear off their windshields because since we were more stopped than moving the snow accumulated almost as if we were standing still. At one point my windshield wipers completely froze up and I leapt out of my car to free them. A man in an SUV slowly crawled by and called out his window, "You okay?" I said, "Yeah, my wipers just froze up." He laughed and said, "You need to be able to see!" I said, "Exactly." Then he told me, as the traffic continued winding by, "Well, be careful!"

Two separate people at the service area where I stopped wished me good luck as I headed back out. Everyone was tired and annoyed, but still managed to encourage each other.

Then I got some gas and a BMW cut me off as I was waiting to leave (and one had already not let me in as I was trying to get on the highway in the first place). There was a car in front of me who had stopped while its driver ran inside. I was kind of annoyed, but was waiting for him to get back. This BMW came weaving around me, I guess thinking he could get by the car, which he couldn't. Jut like I couldn't. THEN when the driver did come back, the BMW sped up and cut in front of me. Because, you know, being that one car in front of me is going to make SO much difference at this point.

Add to that the four or five times when I was changing lanes and BMW's sped up to not let me in. You know, sped up to eight miles an hour versus six. This is including times when I changed lanes to get around a stalled car in front of me. Every other time I changed lanes the cars slowed down to let me in. And I let in my fair share of cars. Beamers were the only ones who didn't. I'm just sayin'.