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Icy Departure from Richmond
December 7, 2007I wanted to leave a quick post in case anyone had been reading closely and figured out that we were in Richmond, Virginia today and planning to leave for home early in the morning. (I have no misconceptions that this actually happened, but I like to cover my bases.)
As we left Richmond we saw the most bizarre scene I have ever seen on a road. We took I-64 west from Richmond to I-81 and after about 30 minutes on the road we passed an accident scene. Two cars were parked on the side of the road and had obviously been in a collision. No one was present so we assumed this happened some time ago. But as we continued west we passed accident after accident. We saw cars flipped over, a car with the rear completely smashed in a near perfect circle like it had struck a large tree trunk at high speed, and the back of a Fed-Ex truck shredded. Eventually traffic on I-64 stopped, and then moved very slowly over a period of almost an hour. We finally came to the source of the delay: a car wedged under some sort of tanker. We passed more cars by the side of road, including an accident scene with someone being attended on a stretcher.
We speculated at the time that there must have been ice earlier in the morning, although the way the accidents were spaced apart was very odd. It wasn't until we arrived home at State College that we did find out that the cause was ice. Not only that, but there were apparently "hundreds of accidents" in central Virginia and over 200 in and around Richmond, with two traffic fatalities. We were all quite spooked and very grateful we left as late as we did (around 8:30 a.m.) I just had to get a bagel at Einstein Bros. Bagels - and you have to wonder if that bagel was the difference between being in an accident and avoiding one. I suppose you can crazy thinking about those sorts of things.
I should have a complete vacation wrap-up tomorrow, including what we found at our house when we arrived home. (Alert Home Owner Tammy was definitely shocked.)
Comments
Carl, I'm glad you made it home safely. Ice is awful anywhere. I grew up in Richmond. We don't exactly get a lot of winter precipitation there so most people don't have any idea how to drive in it. When I was in school, my county would close at the drop of a hat...err...snowflake. We'd get out for an inch of snow on the ground. You can imagine what ice would do to us.
Posted by: Amy | December 8, 2007 4:35 AM