The snow began on Friday, March 7th, and ended late, Saturday night. Click on the above picture to see more of what happened at our house.
My Friday started early, around 4:15 a.m. because I was flying out to Washington’s Dulles airport to be home by 3:30 p.m. that same day. Because I was scheduled to be home that night, I had no change of clothes or toiletries. Why would I need them? I hadn’t even heard of an impending snow storm, and when I heard about possible snow arriving that afternoon on the radio as I drove in to the airport that morning, I didn’t believe it would snow that much. After all, it never snows as much as the forecasters guess. If the weatherman says we’ll get three to six, I take the lower number (3) and divide it by two to see what we’ll actually get. In the three to six case, we’d probably only get and inch or an inch and a half . . . it gets me pretty close.
My crew and I were almost finished with our flying day and were in Dulles (IAD) and getting ready to pushback for our flight to Columbus (CMH). Sounds easy, right? The snow in Ohio had just begun. Everyone was boarded up, the paperwork was finished, and all we needed to do was push back from the gate to start our taxi out for takeoff. We got a frantic call over our operations radio for us to hold our push and call our dispatcher. “Uh-oh,” is all could think of to say. Sure enough, our flight was probably going to be cancelled because the visibility in Columbus was too low to land and the snow was building up on the runways faster than crews could keep it clear. We cancelled a few minutes later and had to kick all the passengers off.
This was 2 p.m. We headed to the hotel and waited for the weather to clear up. Then the 5:05 p.m. flight cancelled, then the 10:00 p.m. flight cancelled, then the 7:45 a.m. flight the next morning cancelled, as did the 12:15 p.m., 5:05 p.m., and the 7:30 p.m. flight. Finally, we were able to take the 10:00 p.m. flight back to Columbus. We had a few passengers that we had abandoned the day before! I landed about 11:30 p.m., and of course, the snow had let up (so I had a boring, no fun, unchallenging approach and landing, oh well.) A Continental Airlines Boeing 737 had run off the end of the runway in the snow and ice the night before, but yours truly didn’t have such an experience.
Laura ended up hanging around all day Saturday in the house, taking a few pictures. I got home about 2:30 a.m. Sunday morning because the roads were still terrible. Church was cancelled and I was able to sleep in and catch up on sleep from the night before.
I think that storms like this are fun because they are something out of the norm. We get into our regular routines and life becomes so boring because the same things take place each day. Blizzards bring about new experiences and visual memories that last a lifetime — not the standard drive to work. I love staying inside and drinking some hot coffee or hot chocolate and watching the snow fall and then pile up into large drifts around the landscape. I hear so many people complain about the weather and don’t want it to snow, or get upset when it does. People, it’s winter! I do feel that Al Gore owes me an apology: I just shoveled 18 inches of global warming out of my driveway! But it was fun, none the less, and I, as a Texan, always enjoy a good snow.
Click here to see more pictures of the snow around the house.
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