The blizzard two weeks ago probably put a hindrance on some holiday travel plans.
I know it did mine.
My dad and his husband were up from Florida from Dec. 20 through roughly Dec. 26.
I was busy working on the Dec. 29 issue Wednesday, Dec. 21, and we’d had some tentative plans of catching up on Friday, Dec. 23, made two weeks prior.
And then the blizzard hit. And it lived up to what forecasters predicted. On Thursday, winds whipped and drifted snow, paired with brutal cold. I worked from home that day, with some holiday movies playing in the background, egg nog on tap.
Friday, those 30-plus mile per hour gusts of wind whipped past my apartment. It was chilly inside and my light would flicker on occasion, but I had most of the newspaper planned out by noon and was waiting on one sports story by 1 p.m.
At 2 p.m. Friday Andrea let me know that dad and crew were still going to be holding a get together if I wanted to try to make it to West Branch. I started looking at if I’d feel safe on the roads.
As I looked at Iowa511 to try and plan my route, snapshots from DOT trucks didn’t look too terrible at times. But then the next photo in the series would highlight how bad whiteout conditions were, and the routes that looked safest for me to traverse were going all the way to Tipton, then to the Interstate to get to West Branch. The whole time a voice in my head kept remembering all the media posts from first responders saying “don’t travel if you don’t need to in this. It’s bad.”
Needless to say, I didn’t make it to West Branch Friday.
I got to see dad, Andrea, grandma, uncle, aunt and a few cousins the next two days, when the winds dissipated and I felt safer to travel. We played card games. We chatted. We exchanged gifts. And I got three days to turn the newspaper off in my brain for the holidays.
Of course, the light snowfall Sunday evening when I was with them in Iowa City made me more cautious on the trek back along Hwy. 1, but it was a gorgeous drive compared to earlier, with Christmas music the whole drive home.
Monday, I spent my official holiday day off treating myself to a triple feature of movies in Cedar Rapids, cashing in some Fandango credits I’d earned earlier this fall before they expired. Avatar: The Way of Water was a technical delight, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was fun and The Fabelmans is definitely going to be a juggernaut for most Academy voters in the Oscar race (but also fun).
Sunny Side: Blizzard can’t dampen holiday spirits for long
January 5, 2023
About the Contributor
Nathan Countryman, Editor
Nathan Countryman is the Editor of the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun.