After quite a few near-misses, we’ve finally gotten some winter weather here. It’s not half a foot of solid ice or anything like that…but it’s bad enough. Because of all the near-misses, the highway department completely blew this one off, and didn’t start sanding streets and highways until it was already bad. It took me nearly two hours to get home because highway traffic wasn’t moving any faster than 35mph.
Highway 71 North, which is already one of the most treacherous highways in the state, if not this part of the country, was worse than usual – just trying to go in a straight line at not-unreasonable speeds, I was fishtailing all over the place – and I even had my trusty camera running! Check out the mildly scary video here.
This is what my car looked like when I closed down the office and went outside today – it was around 2 in the afternoon.
One small step for me…
…and one giant leap for the Arkansas Highway & Transportation Department as it gets caught unprepared (again). Yep, better get those sand trucks out there now that the roads are already godawful.
Getting onto I-540 from Grand Avenue.
Getting ready to crawl across the 540 Arkansas River bridge.
A wreck on Highway 64 east between Van Buren and Alma.
A treacherous-looking shot on the drive home – I didn’t take this street any faster than 20mph.
More of the drive home.
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Is your car front wheel drive or rear wheel drive? I fished-tailed my very first car really bad during one winter and I swore to get a front wheel drive for my next vehicle. I haven’t fish-tailed since (although I DID do a 360 on an icy bridge once @_@).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not telling you to get front wheel drive. I just wanted to say I like my front wheel drive vehicle. 🙂 (I just said front wheel drive four, er, five times).
This one is rear wheel drive, not front wheel drive, so no front wheel drive was available to me in the aforementioned non-front-wheel-drive vehicle.
True fact about me: in 1999, I once fell asleep at the wheel driving from Milwaukee back to Green Bay in the middle of a snowstorm, overcorrected when I realized what was happening, went into the median and then back onto the interstate, where I proceeded to do three full 360s, still with about 50mph forward momentum, with an 18-wheeler right behind me.
And stayed on the road after that.
See, you folks were that close to not having to read my blog. Better luck next time! 😯 Bet that didn’t do any favors to the cardiovascular system of the truck driver either, come to think of it…
And here I am listening to an acoustic version of Pop Song 89 while I read this post . . .