Sunday, February 17, 2008

What an ORDEAL!!

Did you read this article in the paper?
We were part of that nightmare on I-15. Brooke always has volleyball practice on Wednesdays at Open Court by Thanksgiving Point.
Her coach called just as we were getting ready to leave for practice and told us the practice would be optional due to the storm and that she would be there because she was coming from Provo and the storm hadn't hit down there yet. So I told her we would come with the 3 girls from our area. A little storm doesn't bother me and I'd watched the weather at noon and the weatherman had said the storm would dump a few inches and then move out so I figured it couldn't be too bad. This ended up being a very bad decision!
The freeway was totally backed up going down there and it took us 1 1/2 hours to get there, which was 30 minutes late for practice. We finally made it to Open Court and got a phone call from the coach that she'd been stuck on the freeway trying to go north from Provo for an hour and didn't know if she'd ever get there. One other mom braved the storm and was there with 2 girls so we ran the practice ourselves and then let the girls play cards while we waited for the traffic to clear up from the frontage road.
One of the hardest things of that night is that I had Jared and Kamryn with me which is unusual. We kept watching for the traffic to clear up and it never did so at 7:30 we decided to just deal with the traffic jam. It took us 45 minutes just to go one mile down to the freeeway entrance. By the time we got there the Highway Patrol wasn't letting cars go north on the freeway so we were forced to go south on I-15 towards Provo instead of going to SLC. We spent a total of 4 hours in the car trying to get home. Most of that was on the freeway either just sitting or going about 5 mph.
Luckily we had a full tank of gas and sandwiches I had made because the girls go straight from practice to YW. We stopped in Lehi when we got off the freeway to turn around to to go north and got drinks. For part of the time we had my laptop running off a battery so the little kids could watch a movie and then the girls started watching one of the pirates movie until the battery died.
At one point Kamryn and Jared had a crying spell but fortunately it didn't last too long and they went to sleep. The girls had a great attitude about being stuck in the car for so long and even started making up stories about the other travelers around us. One story they made up actually was true.
We finally made it home at 11:30 at night. The worst part was that we missed out on our Young Women's activity. Luckily, due to the storm, school started two hours late the next morning so the girls could sleep in.

2 comments:

Susan Byers said...

I still can't believe that. Glad you made it home ok!

Janice said...

I am so sorry. I had no idea that you were stuck in that mess.