# 241 January 3 got caught in snow storm

January 3, 2018. Today is my birthday but it would not be all umbrella drinks and hammocks today.

We left North Charleston this morning trying to get ahead of the weather. At Charleston and everything stopped and a police officer said it would be about one-and-a-half-hour delay so we took a detour heading towards I-95.

We headed down the road and in a very short time and I mean my half an hour it was snowing heavily on 17 South. A good goal would make be to make it to Savannah Georgia at our boondock at Herbert Spencer boat ramp that I had found earlier last year.

Has we found ourselves about a half an hour north of Savannah it had actually become very snowy and they had a police officer in the middle of the road saying, None Shall Pass, they gestured take a right turn here as a detour.

I pulled over to ask what’s going on. He said up the road there is a fuel truck that has jackknifed and is blocking all the lanes. He said if you want to wait it out it could be hours but if you don't take a right here you should be able to bypass it.

We took the right turn and what was humorous to me is seeing the various car crashes along the way. The brain that caused one of the crashes it didn't speak very highly of a guy. He saw himself as invincible because we saw a pretty modern pickup truck completely upside down in a curve up against the tree. The snow is quite deep now, maybe about a foot. I had to ask myself what kind of mindset causes you to be up upside down in a curve. It means that although we're going along at like 20 miles an hour that guy was going about 60 or 70 miles an hour in these conditions and in the curve he lost it and flipped over on his roof of the truck. I just thought it made him look ignorant you know and I'm sure he was ignorant.

We took the left turn after the detour which was a road that would take you to I-95 and I didn't know it now but we would spend about the next four to six hours in parking lot of I-95.

We inched along going like 1 mile every hour. We stayed in the idling go nowhere traffic jam until it was 8 at night. We started the trip at about 9am. I saw a lot of cars over to the right on the shoulder going around. I remember a cop chasing one of them saying that that's not okay dude. I was stuck in this mess forever it seemed.

After we had been on I-95 for about 4 hours in the snowstorm traffic jam. I noticed everybody else and myself started losing patience for a solution.

It was complete gridlock so I noticed people were using the shoulder to try to go somewhere, anywhere. I knew they were naughty and I thought they were over doing it. After watching about 30 of them go by I decided I had about enough too.

The biggest tease of all was Highway 278 was only two or three miles away and we have been wishing so bad to get to that exit for several hours. We would only go a couple of hundred feet and then stop for another 30 minutes. My lower nature took over and I went ahead and even in this big rig I got on the shoulder where it was nice and slushy and started heading towards that exit. It was only about a mile and a half out at this point.

I'm making pretty good progress and got closer and closer to my goal. I saw blue lights behind me. I guess he wanted me to pull over. I would love to know where accept over in a pine tree somewhere. So I just kept on making steady progress towards the exit. When I got to there he pulled right beside me and said pull over. I told him, if I stop moving, I'll get stuck. He was quite irate with me as I had failed to yield to him. He told me to go up and pull over the very first gas station and I’m writing you a ticket. I went up to the top of the hill and pulled into the shell station and just kind of waited for him to come out and put about 10 bullets into my chest so I can be on YouTube. I waited and waited and he never showed up. I waited for a while and he never arrived. Maybe he got a call from dispatch saying there was somebody in trouble beyond just this Randall guy.

I was pretty sure I wasn’t not out of the woods yet. If he took a photo of my license tag, I'll probably get some mail about it. Fast forward I never did.

After my bizarre all day traffic jam we wondered where we might sleep. There were RVs all parked on the side of the road all over town because of the storm. We rode around looking for any kind of boondock. I saw a large empty parking lot. It was a Catholic church. I was assuming they wouldn’t mind for one night.

We pulled in got comfortable and I was glad we survived. I remember Burt going out and venturing out in the snow but he didn't like it too much and came back in pretty soon. We managed stayed warm enough. Thank goodness for propane heat. The next morning we were ready to leave. The only real downside is that as I left the parking lot I went under a low-lying ice-laden tree limb and destroyed my antenna again. This would be the 3rd destroyed antenna.