(written 1/26)

Today when I was driving home from campus around 5pm, the weather had started to come. The temperature was only barely under freezing so it was a very wet and icy precipitation. Needless to say it made the roads very slippery. I was driving carefully on the commute home, but apparently there was some glass on the road among the slush and my front passenger tire started to quickly lose pressure. Perfect… Luckily, there was no one behind me because my car starter to slide a bit. I had only made it half the way home and did not have a spare (shame),so once I maneuvered to the side of the road, I called AAA to get my car towed. I waited for a while in the car, just trying to stay warm and called my friend Ben. He arrived a few minutes before the truck did. I went home with Ben. Due to the weather I’m just gonna have to wait until tomorrow to deal with the car. I’m not even sure what the roads are gonna be like tomorrow.

This car and I have not had good luck with snow. This time last year my friend Aaron was stuck down in Norfolk visiting his (then) girlfriend at ODU. I was living in an apartment in Richmond at the time, attending VCU. He had gone down there for the weekend by Greyhound bus and of course on Saturday night one of those big snows started. Greyhound immediately cancelled all their buses for three to four days. He called me and basically begged me to come get him out of there. I checked my GPS and saw it was really only a couple hours so I decided I would race the weather. I wasn’t really that bad in Richmond yet and it was a dry non icy snow. I put on my music and hit the road. I don’t remember much about the trip down because the weather and traffic were both fine, I could go the speed limit the whole way without the roads giving me any problem. Once I got to the other ride of the tunnel, things started to looks a little snowier. The roads still not bad. I arrived at the building that Aaron was located and he came out and we took off. Our first bad omen was seeing a truck sideways on an off ramp, having slid on the now forming ice. We made it as far as Williamsburg, now going about fifteen mph under the speed limit when we came to a place where we had to change lanes. I guess enough ice had formed on the road now that we slid. The car turned about fourty-five degrees and we headed off the road. Luckily we hadn’t been going very fast so we slid to a stop about 5 feet from the edge of the treeline. We were now completely stuck in the snow. The car couldn’t move. So once again it was AAA to the rescue. We got pulled out of the snow ditch while we were still in the car (which was kind of fun), and hit the road once again. Eight hours after I originally left Richmond, we pulled up to my apartment. I had rarely been happier to see it.