Last night when I left work at 5:30pm it was snowing like crazy. There were a few inches on my car and in the time it took me to brush it off it was already nearly covered again. The highway going North was slow. When I reached the 128/Mass Pike junction it was crawling. Five miles per hour, tops. By the time you got through Waltham, MA it started to ease up. There were actual bare patches on the pavement. When I merged onto route 93 it slowed down again, but at worst it was around 15 mph. Once you reached Wilmington, MA the road was about 75% snow-free and the speed picked up to about 40-45.
This morning, after the winter storm warnings and end of the world forecasts, I expected to look out the window and see a foot of snow. I also expected that Jen and I would be working from home today. Not quite. What I actually saw was the same mostly bare driveway I pulled into last night at 8:00pm. We didn’t get anything at all. I checked the news and saw that to the South of our home the storm dumped a lot of snow. Over a foot in some places. I figured up North in the Merrimack Valley the highways would be okay, but at some point between home and work I’d get stuck in some serious snow traffic.
Not even close. I left the house at a little before 7:00am, stopped for gas, and then hit the road. The CRV was out of washer fluid so I had to stop once to clean off the windshield. I stopped at the rest area on 128 South that is just before route 9. Have you ever driven a Honda CRV? Last night Jen tried to add some washer fluid but couldn’t find the hood release. I looked around for it this morning before I left, but I was still expecting a two hour drive so I didn’t look long. While I was at the rest stop I found the latch. It is the tiniest little thing and it is located in the weirdest, most illogical place. I probably spent 10 minutes trying to figure it out. In the end, the entire drive (including the rest stop) took slightly less than one hour.
The forecasts yesterday were calling for my neighborhood to get hit with as much as 8 to 12 inches of snow. We ended up getting a dusting. With apologies to folks living on Cape Cod (who got bombarded with snow overnight), this is exactly the kind of weather forecast screw up that I like. If you folks are going to get it seriously wrong, the very least you could do is get it wrong in a way that benefits us. Not like last weekend when we got snow accumulation when none was predicted. That screw up sucked. Today’s screw up is fine with me.
