Homeward Bound Adventure from Colorado

While we were in Colorado (from Wednesday night to Sunday morning) it snowed Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Saturday afternoon we checked the weather out on Hannah's phone to make sure that we weren't going to get bad weather on Sunday, when we were planning to leave. It said a 30% chance of less than 1" accumulation. We checked it a couple of times throughout the afternoon and it said the same thing - so, we figured we were good to go.

Boy, were we ever wrong!! We got up at 3:30am on Sunday morning and left my mom's around 4 am. When we left there was already about 4" of snow on the ground at my mom's. We got about 10 miles or so outside town (we take Hwy 24 from Colorado Springs to Limon and then get on I-70) and it was still very dark out and snowing very hard. We could hardly see the road so we decided that it was stupid for us to try to do this in the dark. So, we decided to turn around and go back to my mom's and leave when it got light out.

We left again around 7 am and we got to the last road off Hwy 24 that leads into Colorado Springs and they had closed the Hwy. We called the highway patrol to see if Hwy 94 was closed and they said that it wasn't but that it was under the same conditions as Hwy 24 and if we chose to go that way we were traveling at our own risk. We decided that we probably shouldn't do that so we went back to my mom's.

We called the highway patrol around 10 am to see if they had opened Hwy 24 back up and they had so we left AGAIN!! The roads were very icy and the wind was blowing very hard and the further we got the worse it got. We were in white out conditions at times and the wind was blowing us all over the icy road. There were times when Mark almost couldn't keep the car on the road. We got to Calhan, which is about 1/2 way between Colo Spgs and Limon and I told Mark that there was a hotel there in town and that we were stopping. We were being stupid to continue in the white out conditions. He agreed. So, we pulled into the hotel parking lot (you have to go down a hill from the highway) and due to the whiteout conditions he couldn't see that there was a 1 1/2 foot drift where you would pull in under the awning and drove straight into it and got the car stuck. It took us an hour to get the car unstuck and then we had to hike through a few more snow drifts to get to our room because we couldn't get the car to where our room was.

Poor Mark, he was soaked from the waist down and we had no clean clothes since we didn't plan to be there an extra day. So, we hauled the dirty clothes bag to the room so we could all have dry clothes and our pj's.

Around 2:30 pm or so, Mark looked out the window and it had finally stopped snowing and the traffic was moving on the highway. Mark said that we could leave if I wanted to. I told him that I was done trying to get out for the day. We didn't know what the roads were like and we only had about 2 hrs of daylight left to drive and I didn't want to drive all night (remember, we'd been up since 3:30 am). So around 3:30 pm we went down the street to Subway and I told everyone we were each ordering foot longs so that we could eat half for lunch and half for dinner later. So, that's what we did. We also bought some dice (the Subway is in a gas station) so we could play dice. So, we watched TV and played dice all evening.

We left the next morning at around 6:15 am and finished driving to Limon. Roads were still icy in spots but not really too bad. Of course, we got about 5-10 miles outside of Limon and there wasn't a drop of snow anywhere - go figure. All we had to do is get to Limon but we couldn't.

Anyway, we got home Monday afternoon - safe and sound!! And this is definitely not an adventure that I care to repeat ever!! :o)