Day 1 was fine, day 2 was horrible! The whole state of IL was icy, windy, cold, and slow-moving. Once we got to mid-state we were going less than 5 miles an hour with really low visibility (if any). I cannot tell you how many cars and trucks we saw off the road! Tonito was counting semi-trucks off the road- not just pulled over, but 16-wheelers that were on their side, upside-down, or in a crash. He literally was up to 68 when I told him he could stop and watch the DVD. I felt like we were in a movie. One stretch we were stopped for about 3 hours without moving more than 500 feet. We finally made it to an exit, and got off looking for food and bathrooms. My dad and brother had called hotels and found out that there was only one hotel with rooms still. It was 9pm, the highway was closed ahead of us because an oil tanker and crashed and caused a 20 car pile-up with multiple deaths. It was so sad that families were getting in crashes, especially so close to the holidays- we passed an SUV with at least 3 car seats that had flipped over, another semi-truck on top of a small car, a Fed-Ex truck that had flipped over and spilled a lot of its contents, a mini-van that had hit a tree and caught on fire, and literally hundreds and hundreds of smaller crashes in the ditches. With the highway closed, and no room in the inns, we had to carry on. We followed the parade of cars onto a small country road running parallel to the interstate. I felt like we were inside a snow globe, barely moving. "Kids, this is really dangerous. Everyone has to be perfectly quiet and look out the window at the cars in the snow so papi can pay attention to the road." They were so good! We finally made it at midnight, alive and well, about 7 extra hours than it normally would take us.
No comments:
Post a Comment