Thea and Mark's Snowy Day

On Thursday, December 17 I looked at the weather map for Philadelphia and points south. We were planning to leave after the meal on Saturday to drive to Raleigh, spend the weekend with daughter Angela and her family, then go on to Athens and spend the rest of the week with daughter Andrea and her family. I noticed that snow was to begin around midnight Friday in the Philly area, and that Maryland and Virginia were to get quite a bit of snow as well. We debated as to whether we should ask if we could leave on Friday rather than Saturday. We didn't need to as Judy, our coordinator, called us at 7:30 Friday morning and suggested we leave before the snow started. So we rushed around, got packed, served the meal, then at 2 pm left town. All was well until we got south of DC. For some inexplicable reason, the traffic slowed to 20 mph. After about an hour of slow going on I-95, we ran into snow. This snow was coming down hard and fast. We could see 3 inches already on parking lots along the highway. We figured at this rate we would reach Raleigh at 5 am, if we didn't plow into a ditch. We saw an exit at about 7:30 pm that had 6 motels, and got over to the right lane to exit. Unfortunately, the traffic didn't appear to be moving up the ramp. I could see a Quality Inn above our location, separated by a fence from the interstate. Mark suggested I get out, climb the fence and book us a room. So I donned by coat, grabbed my purse, and hiked up through the snow to the top of the berm. After several tries I was able to mount the fence, push down the barbed wire, and jump over. I then made it up to the motel and stood in line. Meanwhile, Mark was still trying to go up the ramp. He finally drove around some stopped trucks, got halfway up, and the traffic stopped again. All the drivers got out to see what was happening. It appeared that two cars had collided, but finally decided to ignore any damage and move on. At this time Mark started up the car again, but had no traction. He managed to finesse the car a little at a time up the ramp, and arrived at 8:30 at the motel. At this point we were 30 miles north of Richmond, VA
The next morning we awoke to about a foot of snow. We figured we would be spending another night at the motel. We went out to knock the snow off our car, and to our amazement, the interstate was plowed and traffic moving normally. A man came by and told us there was a two hour break in the snow, and if we wanted to go, now was the time. We grabbed our bags, left without getting food, and drove south. Within a mile we saw that things were still pretty bad on the interstate. We saw lots of cars stranded, some even in the main lanes. There were cars in the median, some turned upside down, and others pointing in the wrong direction,having done a 360. Ramps were closed due to disabled vehicles on the ramp. We felt so blessed that we had gotten off when we did, had gotten a room, and had been safe in our travels. We made it to Raleigh safely, and look forward to spending Christmas with our children and grandchildren. We don't even feel guilty about leaving early from the Inn, because they had 2 feet of snow on Saturday, and probably had less than 100 guests at the meal.