Seattle doesn’t get a lot of snow, when it does get some snow like for ½ a day or 1 day, most people work from home, kids skip school, shops close early, ... you get the picture. This year Seattle saw quite a bit of continuous snow. Enough that the governor had to declare statewide weather emergency.  I worked from home for a week. I drove around only for a bit and quite carefully. My car is a front wheel drive and I had been meaning to get snow chains. All stores in Seattle area were out of chains – apparently my tyre model is the most common. One evening on my way back from a grocery store, I tried driving down this small stretch of steep downgrade road to my parking garage, over what looked like packed snow. As it turned out it was ice and my car skid by 180 degrees on a 1 way street. Braking, steering, mumbling etc didn’t change the course of the car, A few pedestrians did run frantically though. That incident was scary, I parked the car by the street side. Either the snow had to melt or I had to get snow chains to be able to move around again. Next 2 days neither happened, I stayed home mostly and travelled on foot to get food & basic supplies (that includes ice cream). A day later, due to circumstances, I decided to drive to San Francisco. When I went to my car, I saw this. People do have a sense of humor. At least it didn’t say “Wash Me” like some other cars I saw. With all my inexperience I tried to shovel the snow away from the front tyres to get the car out. With help from some strangers, the car was out on the road again. I had to stand in line to get chains at a store, some of the gas stations in Redmond were out of gas and so I had to drive around a couple to finally get premium gas only at one distant gas station. When I went to get some food at a 7-11,  I thought that the staff there was unusually nice & friendly ... and then I noticed Fox News crew with the camera focused on the staff. I should have checked the news that evening to see if I was caught on camera buying ice cream.

Next day early morning, I started the much dreaded road trip. Had the skidding accident not happened 2 days ago, I probably wouldn’t have dreaded it as much.

A 11.5 hours drive took 18 hours, but thankfully there were no incidents. Some season to remember. I have never seen so many driving rules being broken; you could pretty much park anywhere not fearing getting towed/ticketed, you could drive in any lane, some went up the wrong way on a 1-way road, Cars/Trucks took any lane on the interstate, pulled over anywhere with/without emergency lights flashing, … While some of this was amusing, most of the stuff I saw around made me strongly wish that everything would return to normal. There were several accidents, tons of vehicles getting towed probably coz they got stuck in snow, ambulances & paramedics all around, cop cars all over, people crying … Quite sad that this was happening to many of them just before Christmas. Fortunately for me, I got to San Francisco on Christmas eve and got to spend the vacation with Roshan as planned. Except the whole order of places had to be changed/re-done with all reservations going for a toss because of the timings.

We spent time in parts of California and drove back via Nevada. I got to see pretty much all terrains on the road trip. It was quite beautiful. US has vast amounts of land with pretty much nothing. It was all quite pretty. When we got back to Seattle, it was drizzling and it was grey. Sigh, what a beautiful city and what crappy weather. Most of the year, Seattle is cold & grey & wet – and you are seeing it out of your window from a closed office, apartment or car  like watching a movie.

And with this trip the longest road trip for me has been 4150 miles. I will upload some pictures here.