I was not expecting the office to close at 2 o’clock today. That’s just not the sort of thing that’s done. And when I pulled out of the parking lot at roughly 2:15 and hit the highway, I thought to myself, ‘This doesn’t seem so bad.” The drive to Mason-Dixon Line was… well, it was ordinary. It was wet and gross, but ordinary.
Traffic bunched up when I got into Pennsylvania, not because the road conditions warranted it, but because people traveling northbound had to slow down to gawk at an accident on the southbound side of 83 at about mile marker 2, then at two snow plows running south in tandem (with a long back-up behind it) at about mile marker 6.
The band of rain seemed to end just south of the state line, and the world brightened a bit with the sun poking through. Around Exit 8 (so, ten or eleven miles north of the sun breaking through), it began to snow. And Exit 14, Leader Heights Road, was slushy. I quickly realized that closing early had been a good thing, as the secondaries were sloppy and icy and gross. The turn off of Queen Street onto McDowell Road was a bit treacherous (and involved sliding a little further than I’d have liked), but Oak Road/Orchard Street (they’re the same, depending on which locality it runs through) were generally fine.
My parking lot, however, was a sheet of ice that didn’t even break from the weight of the Beetle. There was no crunching, there was no breaking. It was very strange. The Beetle is a heavy vehicle.
Time from parking lot to parking lot? An hour exactly.
I brought home work to work on, and I will be working on that throughout the afternoon.
Deadlines.