Rain, Snow, and Two Cars in the Mud

Yesterday morning we awoke to a pouring, pounding rain.  The storm arrived at ~3 am – I know that because it woke me up when it started, rain being blown so hard it sounded like rocks being thrown at the house. 

But we had a lost cell phone to pick up 70 miles away at the Walmart customer service desk.  The weather forecast said it wouldn’t start snowing until early evening, so my husband and I decided to make the drive and left about 9am.  On the way over we passed in and out of heavy rain and very light snow, but the drive was essentially fine.  We were only there for a half hour, or less, then headed back home.  What a difference an hour can make!  Within 20 miles we were in whiteout conditions, with 3 plus inches of heavy snow/slush on the road, and a heavy base coat of ice.  It was white knuckle time.  Luckily the traffic was light, with few cars on the road, but there were several times we started to slide, once or twice when cars were in the other lane.  My husband kept slowing down as the conditions worsened.  For the last 20 or so miles we rarely got up to 30mph.  We made it home, safe, but exhausted.  It kept snowing through the day and intermittently through the night and this morning, for a total accumulation of 6-8” of heavy wet snow.  Because of the heavy rains which preceded the snow, our famous clay mud was everywhere, including our dirt road, driveway, our neighbor’s easement road, etc.

This morning our neighbors were coming over at 10am for brunch and bridge.  We try to do that every week - to keep the old brains active, and to have a good time.  A little before 10 this morning they called to tell us they were stuck on their easement road.  The very same road that was washed out in one of our 3” rainstorms last summer, and which they had spent big money having fixed last Fall.  But it hadn’t been compacted enough to deal with this storm, so their wheels sank into the softened road base and couldn’t move.  My husband took his 4WD Explorer to rescue them.  10 minutes later I got a call from him (luckily we had picked up his cell phone) that he had slid off a soft shoulder into a ditch while attempting to turn his car around.  So I headed out in my little 4WD Escape, trying not to laugh too hard, and picked them all up at the intersection between our “main” dirt road and their easement road.  We had brunch and played bridge for a few hours, and then were ready to tackle the task of getting the cars unstuck.  We called another neighbor with a “vintage” 4WD Bronco, that has huge tires.  He also has a towing strap.  He was able to pull both cars out, but not without a little excitement as he almost got stuck on one section of the easement road. 

So that was our interesting day.  The only other excitement was my husband having to climb onto our roof to scrape the snow off our solar panels.  Next summer we hope to relocate them to ground level so we won’t have to ever do that again.