Christmas: Part 4 – The Drive

This blog post is Part 4 in the series Christmas 2010 on our Christmas experience.

I have realized lately that while I love that this blog has become an outlet for my spiritual mind, it has kept people less and less up to date with what our family is actually doing.  In an attempt to rectify this I thought I would share more about our Christmas experiences with you.  I know it's a little late, but there is a story to tell, so bear with me.

After all of the Christmas exchanges had ended, my brother and his wife drove back to Iowa, and the New Year came, we began to get sick.  Not just a little sick, but really sick.

What started out as a tommy ache soon turned to throwing up multiple time for Rebecka.  Next was Aaron, then Andrew, then Rachel threw up close to 10 times!!!  If that wasn't enough Autumn threw up almost as many times as Rachel the very next day, and finally I got sick the next night.  Literally, in the first six days of 2011, all six members in our family were sick and vomiting!

In addition to my family, nearly my entire brothers family got sick (there are five of them, a couple in my sisters family got sick, and both of my parents got sick.  Then the day before we were suppose to leave to go back to Orlando, Michiana received a record downfall of snow.  This would obviously make it hard to leave on time.  Autumn still wasn't feeling up to par so we set our trip back a few days until she was feeling better and we could drive in the weather

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Un-luckily for us, Georgia had a little snow storm of their own.  So much so that their Governor called a State of Emergency!  This delayed our trip roughly seven hours. Normally the state of Georgia takes about 5-6 hours to drive, it took us roughly 13!  We drove an average of 15 miles an hour for a couple hours, then later in the day when things sped up we were zipping along at the daring speeds of 30-35 mph!  It wasn't until roughly 8:15 pm that we were able to drive the speed limits on any roads, and forget about stopping to eat anywhere.

Every place we stopped to eat starting around 4:30 pm in downtown Atlanta was closed.  The first resteraunt not called Denny's or Waffle House was a small little Pizza Hut that we found at an exit.  It was about 100 miles south of Atlanta and we were finally able to eat dinner at 9pm that night..

We tried to take many other pictures but it was hard while we drove, so mostly what we have are the links next to the tweets (in the blog post titled Christmas: Part 5 – The Twitter Timeline) .  We did see multiple semi-trucks banged into each other and for over an hour we drove through the middle lane on I-75 at 15 mph while all other vehicles almost were off on the shoulder just sitting there hoping that somehow something was going to change.

Eventually police forced everyone off I-75, so we had to get on another highway and go around until that highway ran into I-75 again.  I-285 was completely closed and people were stuck in their cars just sitting in the same spot for hours on end.  We ended up driving all the way through the conditions, mainly because we didn't have anywhere to stay.  At one point someone offered to call a friend for us, but where they were located (normally would have been 30 min from us) had just taken us over two hours to drive from there to where we were, there was no way we were going back.  In addition, it was suppose to get worse the next day, so on we pushed on.

Once we reached the Florida border the driving was fine and we only had 3.5 hours to go to get home.  I don't think either Autumn or I will ever forget that trip.  It has to be some of the worst driving conditions that we have ever been in, but praise God He helped us get through it!

To read more about our Christmas 2010 experience, click on: Part 5 – The Twitter Timeline

Related posts:

1. Christmas: Part 5 – The Twitter Timeline
2. Moving to Indiana: The Mini-Series – Part 5

Tagged as: Atlanta Snow Storm, Blizzard, Denny's, I-285 Closing, I-75, Pizza Hut, South Bend Snow Storm, Twitter, Waffle House