The long road home...

The second I left our wonderful Hot Springs condo, things started to go downhill. Less than an hour into what should have been a 9-10 drive, I hit my first big traffic jam. We sat about 45 minutes and there was lots of truck traffic leading up to it and pretty much the rest of the way through Arkansas. After I got down the road a ways, about an hour, just past West Memphis, I hit the second big jam of the trip. The longest darn traffic jam EVER.


For almost 3 hours, in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas, we sat. Of course, because we were in the middle of nowhere, everyone - including myself - was concerned about running out of gas. It was ok though, because we literally didn't move that entire time, so we sat with the cars turned off. People got out and chatted and tried to figure out what was going on. I had Scott on the phone trying to find alternate routes for me, although I wasn't moving to get to an exit any time soon. Not to mention, my phone was dying so I had it sucking the power out of my laptop (it doesn't like car chargers.)
Saturday, a little snow storm had blown through. Apparently, the road crew responsible for I-55 in Mississippi County is STUPID. They obviously hadn't plowed the roads, so there was what we thought was "slush" on the road. But no, it was ICE. It's pretty pathetic when the shoulder of the road is more clear than the road.



The snow had melted and refrozen into solid hard, 4+ inch thick slabs of ice. When we did actually start to creep along, every exit we came across was blocked by some vehicle that had slid on the ice. I'm not entirely sure what held us up, but on the second exit I tried to take, a big charter bus was blocking the exit as it was being towed off. Eventually, I managed to get off the interstate and rerouted myself on a back road, which was totally cleared by the way. Obviously, not every road crew in Arkansas is incompetent.

So, my 9 hour drive home turned into a 13 hour drive home. It was worth the fun we had though!