March 6, 2008 Snow

The early snow forecasts said we might have an inch. I was at work in downtown Fort Worth when Joyce emailed me that she was going home and I should, too, because of weather. That was about 1:30 p.m. We had nothing downtown but clouds. On her way home, Joyce encountered heavy snow, icy roads and lots of cars in the ditch. She called me a couple of times warning me to be careful. The last time she called, she said she couldn't get the Explorer up the court to the house and had to park it down the street several houses away.

I left my work a little after 3:00 and though it was snowing downtown, it was 34 degrees and the roads weren't icy at all. In fact, the entire drive home was fine. Snow was falling, but the roads were fine. Then I got to within a half a mile of home and encountered really icy roads, several cars in the ditch and lots of very slow traffic. On Pearson Lane, near our house, the police were blocking people from going up the hill I had just come down and rerouting them. Several cars and trucks were in the ditch near that intersection. I made the turn onto Summer Lane and when I got to our court, it was totally white with about 4 inches of snow. "No problem," I thought. "It's just snow." I figured I'd make it up the hill and down the driveway, then go back and get the Explorer. Wrong!

There was ice under that snow. Joyce said it had sleeted for over 2 hours before it began to snow. My truck made it partway up the hill and that was it. I had to back down to near where Joyce had parked and leave the truck there.

Funny, when we watched the six o'clock news, the snow had ceased and traffic was moving along at a pretty good clip. That was in the cities south of us. They evidently didn't get what we got. We heard on the radio and TV that places just north of us got 10 inches or more. You can see from the pictures what we got—Joyce measured it on the deck railing and we had four inches.

Our daughter-in-law, Amber, was stranded for three hours trying to get Andrew home from school in Flower Mound, which is north of us. It was beautiful.