I’m on a vacation with my family (from snowy NY), we left Bryan TX yesterday at 7am and got to Nashville around 11pm. Got to use my cruise control for all of 5 minutes of that. Worst drive of my life, took a good 7 hours to get from Bryan to Texarkana going 20-30 mph at most on either icy roads or sheets of ice roads. Didn’t get much better in Arkansas or Tennessee. This weather has been following us our entire trip, here’s a breakdown:
Leaving NY we had a couple of inches on the highways through western NY, into PA and northern OH.
Cincinnati got their biggest snow storm in 12 years, overnight before our departure the next morning.
Memphis had a real nice ice storm overnight before our departure the next morning (see a pattern?). Got stuck in Arkansas for a few hours dealing with that, and once in Texas was dealing with pouring rain right around freezing temp. This was the same day as the big pile up in Fort Worth. I was hoping this would be the worst travel day buttttt....
We left Bryan a day early, hoping to get out ahead out the storms that would be hitting that day (originally supposed to be hitting the next day). The night before we left there was a warning for a glaze of ice on the roads...well it was a little bit more than that. After taking 7 hours for what should have been half that, Arkansas and Tennessee had freezing rain into snow for our entire trip. 16 hours of driving through hell. Since we left Texas a day early, I had to get another Airbnb for one night until we can go to the one we originally booked. We are currently at the first Airbnb, waiting until check in for our next (and the current hosts are being very nice offering us to stay here until that time). The weather is currently freezing rain pretty hard, on already really icy roads from what I can tell. Really hoping it switches over to snow before we go back out in this.
And let me tell you all, it’s not looking good for the rest of our trip, unless we want to stay here for a full week. We’ve had a great time as a family in the places we have been, but the travel has been like something out of a movie. Our original plan was to go to Cleveland next and stay a few days, at this point if I could get more than half our trip home without absolute **** weather, I’d do a straight shot home. That’s not looking good though, so more than likely we will have 2 more travel days to deal with awful weather, with a stop in Cleveland.
To top this all off, the whole reason we went to Bryan TX in the first place, was to take my gf’s daughter to a invitational softball combine. We were about 60 miles away from
Bryan when the text came in that the event was cancelled. That was the quietest part of our trip, by a deafening long shot. We have made the most of it and have still been able to have a really great time and make some great memories...but man I could really use a break from this weather! Kicker is it will be back in the 70s soon in Texas. We had one day where it got to 40 this entire trip.
Sorry for the long story, it has been a ridiculous journey! Here’s a picture I took after finally getting out of TX. Truck was garaged the night before so this was all from being on the road.
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