Ice Road SUV-ers

Dan and I occasionally stumble on an Ice Road Truckers marathon on the History channel and when we do, we usually end up watching. No clue why the show is so fascinating, but it is. However, in the future, I think I would prefer to see such driving conditions limited to television screen viewing. Not windshield viewing.

Because this is what we woke up to on Christmas eve.

So it started then and never really stopped. Even on our drive to my parents' later that afternoon. In fact, these were some of the better driving conditions we experienced.

Yay! We can see the road again!

Fortunately, Dan's an experienced snow driver so we were able to make it where others... just weren't so lucky. In fact, we passed a stopped line of about eight cars to tackle this monster hill.

On the way up and over, we passed two vehicles that had someone pushing. And see the headlights in that picture? Those were from a duley driving in reverse up the hill, towing a little Ford. That guy was having way too much fun doing that.

About the time we got to my parents' town, though, the snow had finally stopped.

But it managed to dump between four and seven inches of that stupid white stuff everywhere (depending on what news reports you listened to). My parents' house ended up closer to the four side of the equation and that was plenty, thank you. In fact, it guaranteed that we had plenty of the white stuff left over on Christmas day - my first white Christmas since moving to Texas in 1989 (we've had a white Christmas eve before but it had all melted by the next day). The wind had also been blowing during all the snowing so we were left with some pretty big drifts, too. This one was hanging off of the roof of my parents' porch.

All of this is something I might have enjoyed ten years ago, but now I just feel like I'm ready for summer. And the fact that there is still snow in my backyard's more shady areas? Is simply not cool.

Oh yeah. And Christmas happened.