Well, I certainly took my life into my own hands driving in to work today.

You know it isn't going to be a good trip when you can't see more than one block in town due to the blowing snow (and that's the distance at which you can see someone else's headlights, and only headlights).

And when you finally get on the highway you find though they've plowed once already today, the effort was futile, because you're guessing where the road actually is...at least when you can actually see through the windshield because snow and ice keep caking up on it, despite the efforts of the wipers, so you're constantly tilting and moving your head trying to find a clear hole to see through and thus the car is probably drifting back and forth, but you can't tell because you can barely see as it is.

And you'd pull over to try and clean the windshield completely to give you a few minutes of clear viewing, but you don't know where the shoulder is exactly nor fancy ending up in the ditch, or being hit by one of the half-dozen cars behind you who also can't see where the road is and are thus following you hoping you know where the road is. Besides, you aren't sure that even if you found the shoulder without incident you wouldn't be stuck and unable to get the car moving again.

Fun.

At least the road in to the station was drivable, for the moment, though I almost didn't make it through the parking lot without getting stuck. I sure hope someone plows the parking lot and the road out here to the station, or I'm going to end up stuck overnight.

We're supposed to drive up to my parents' tomorrow morning; I can only say I hope the weather and roads are a whole lot better by then, or we're not going (and not just because of Jen's travel anxiety).

UPDATE: Yep, I ended up stuck at work...for a little bit. I became stuck just trying to get out of the parking lot, despite my honed-by-years-of-practice mad winter driving skillz. Thankfully a couple of guys were passing by in a truck and stopped to help push me clear since my car just couldn't quite push through the drifts under its own power.

Then I became stuck at the intersection between the road the station is on -- which had thankfully been traveled enough through the day to be drivable -- and the main road into the nearby town. The plow trucks had cleared the main road but banked the snow so high on the intersection between the frontage and the main it was up to the headlights on my car, and I wasn't able to just bull through.

The guys who had helped me earlier stopped and helped dig a path through, then pushed from behind again while I gunned it across/through the bank so I could get onto a decent road. Then I had to take the long way around because the plows had banked the intersection between the main road and the highway as well, and I just wasn't in the mood to deal with that as well. So I followed the main through town to the on-ramp on the other side, which (thankfully) had been plowed clear.

All in all, it took me an hour to make it home...I went six miles in an hour and burned through a quarter tank of gas to do it.