Christmas day drive!

So this year Christmas was my holiday to work at Pullman Regional Hospital in the ICU where I've been working since our move to Pullman in '06. I knew this well in advance, but had asked for 2 weeks off starting with the day after. One of my very nice co-workers, Tessa, offered to give me her on call portion of the holiday, which meant that if there were no sick calls in the ICU that we would be able to drive home that day!! I was really excited for the opportunity, but Eastern Washington had received so many snow storms that we had no idea what roads were even going to be open. So when I called in at 5am and found out we were free to go, we did some research and plotted our course or home.

We had opened our gifts the night before but had to get the Christmas tree down and ready to go out on the curb while we were gone. We had been looking for weeks coming up to Christmas for a place that had chains for our tires, just in case the 4th of July pass got bad. But to our luck no one had any since none of the shipments were coming through as expected. I still had to finish packing too, so by 09:15 we were on the road, after we made sure that we had food and water to survive if we did get stranded in our car. It was slower going most of the way which made a normally 9 hour drive, almost unbearable!!!


Chad was nice enough to drive from Pullman to Missoula. The hardest stretch for him was from Moscow to Sandpoint, ID area. Only having the single lane highway made it hard to pass people and the roads weren't excellent. So it took us about 2 hours to get that far. But after getting on I-90 we at least had a clear right lane with slush in the left lane. SO then again we have to pass the overly cautious people that would only go 40 MPH. To do so we'd have to slow down to cross over into the other lane and then speed up as much as we dared and then slow down to get back in the right lane. What a white knuckled ride. I really think that Chad was relieved when we got to Missoula and it was my turn to drive.

So we stopped in Missoula to get a bite to eat. I though for sure there would be something open. BUT NO! We ended up going to an Albertson's and got a cold deli sandwich cause they didn't even have the warm food area open that day. So a word to the wise, don't expect anything to be open on Christmas! I was shocked and a little jealous since I've been working Christmases for what seems like forever.

After our quick break, it was my turn and it took me a while to get the passing cars thing down, but we really had a little better roads and some more straighter roads than what Chad had to drive. I really made good time until we hit the junction near Butte to get on I-15 and it started to snow and by that time it was getting dark. Things still weren't too bad. We were really being cautious and decided that we'd only let the gas tank get to half empty before we would refill. So we stopped in Dillon to get gas and Chad went into the gas station to check on the update for south of Dillon. The report wasn't real great which made us nervous, but I had a good feeling that we'd be okay. So I talked Chad into going on and I drove the rest of the way while Chad tried to sleep to get rid of the horrendous headache he had. (Which isn't a good sign cause he gets back headaches with storms. But he did sleep for an hour, which is amazing for him and under the great driving conditions, I thought he'd be too nervous!)

So on we went and it did get to snowing pretty well, but there wasn't a ton of traffic and so I had 2 lanes of snow packed road that I could drive on and didn't do to bad just staying between the 2 sets of reflector lights on either side. We got to the Monida pass and there was an area that had some little drifts. But not bad we were able to drive through them without any difficulty. I also noticed that all of the snow plows were on the North bound side so I'm assuming that they had just got done with our side, so the drifts could have been really bad. We hit Dubois ID and that was when the winds picked up and the open area gave us some visual difficulties. But we were able to make it to my parent's house that night after 11 hours on the road. Not too bad!! We were just glad to be done!!