An irritating end to an irritating year.

They said it was the worst traffic they'd seen in 20 years. I don't know if I buy that...20 years is a very long time. How could one, in the matter of a few hours, remember all the bad traffic jams in 20 years and declare that December 29 was the worst one? Does anyone else think about that? Regardless, it WAS really bad traffic. When it takes one fairly responsible driver FOUR HOURS to get from NE 102nd Ave to SW 50th Ave, that's BAD traffic. And stupid drivers. Especially when in regular traffic it only takes 15 or 30 minutes to get from point A to point B.

So maybe part of it was my fault. Maybe I should have left Tabby's house as soon as we got back from the store and flakes had been falling for about half an hour. But noooo....I trusted the online weather report that said it was going to rain in a couple hours and melt the snow. So I hung out for an hour, while the snow piled up. But still, it was only like a dusting at that point. No big deal. Until I-84 (the worst freeway ever, snow or not), where I sat cursing at the snow for 2 hours. When I finally got to the I-5 interchange, I saw why I'd been sitting so long. Six cars were scattered around the lanes for I-5 South, putting chains on. Not even in an accident. They just thought that would be a great place to stop and put chains on. Who in their right mind would think that THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD would be the best place to put chains on? Who taught these people to drive? If I did that and my father found out, I'd never hear the end of it. He might even figure out some way to take my driver's license away from me, or suspend it somehow.

So basically, there was only one lane (out of three - Northbound was pretty much closed due to 2 stuck cars on the onramp) of traffic going through to I-5 South. You had to manuver around the people putting chains on their cars. When I finally did see I-5 South, it was not moving at all. So I decided I'd take the Morrison bridge across the river and try my luck downtown to Barbur. Turns out there was really no way around this mess. I was moving pretty smoothly downtown for about six blocks. Main Street's where my luck stopped. It was stop & go all the way to Barbur, mostly stop. There were a few times this car to my right slipped on the ice & instead of turning his steering wheel to get out of whatever rut he was in, the guy just kept pushing on the gas. I was so afraid he was going to slide back in crash into me. Jeez. And then there were a few times I got stuck myself, but I've been lucky enough to have enough people in my life who know how to drive in ice/snow and they've passed that knowledge down to me. I was always able to shift myself out of the ruts. Whew. When I finally did get to Barbur, there were FOUR BUSES stuck. Well, at least they looked stuck. One was for sure, it was in two lanes. So I decided to forget that route and got back on the freeway. One whole lane for I-5 South was dedicated to cars that people had abandoned. Yeah.

I sat on I-5 South for about an hour. It actually wasn't too bad. I was definitely feeling better there than I was downtown. I freaked about a bit while I was downtown, even considering parking my car somewhere and taking the MAX back home. Or a bus to my co-worker's house. But I decided that the buses were having their own problems and I didn't want to get in the middle of that.

Getting off at the Terwilliger exit was interesting. At the very last second, a huge semi decided he was going to get off the freeway in front of me. I almost crashed into him. Seriously....who do these people think they are? Anyway, there were a couple of cars stuck on the offramp, but I got around them and high-tailed it to BHH (Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy, for those country folk). There were quite a few cars parked on BHH too. Lovely. And there was a car and a bus stuck coming towards Hillsdale at Dosch Road. That caused the traffic to back up on that side all the way to Albertson's (at least a mile, perhaps two). I'm glad I wasn't on that side. However, that made it impossible for me to park at the office. So I parked at the restaurant across the street and hiked up to my co-worker's house. The cats were just fine, snuggled in their little cat beds. Luckies.

So yeah. I will never, under any circumstances, ever get on the freeway if it's snowing in Portland again. NEVER.

It was really pretty walking up to my co-worker's house though. Snow makes everything beautiful. Well, except for freeways.