Winter Trip 2016: to Louisville

Jan. 21-22: I didn’t really intend to start right off with the blog but it has been so eventful I decided to go ahead so people know what is happening. We had watched the weather so carefully and everything looked good for Indiana and Michigan. Thursday we planned on seeing Ken’s family in Fort Wayne and stay the night with Sarah’s family to celebrate Analyn’s fifth birthday. Originally we planned to head east from there and take I75 down to Atlanta, with an overnight using our Choice points in Knoxville. But as Thursday wore on a mega storm named Jonas was building and threatening Central Kentucky across and east, up the mid-Atlantic coast.  As soon as we got to Carmel Marv managed to change our reservation from Knoxville to Louisville and our route from I75 to I65. We celebrated the birthday at Chuck E. Cheese for dinner. 

Pizza and Pretzel sticks with sauce for dinner

Dancing with Chuck E. Cheese

Analyn opened our presents before bed. All the My Little Ponies and the butterfly/fairy wings were a big hit, but especially the remote control Pony airplane! 

All the Little Ponies!

Butterfly/Fairy Wings

We celebrated Analyn again at nursery school for snack time on Friday. 

Playing with her phone before school, dressed in her new tutu

Singing to the Birthday Girl

Mommy cuts the Birthday Cookie

We left from school and got on the road heading into the storm. But we didn’t see any snow at all until about half an hour from Louisville, where it was coming down hard. Although it was only noon they had a room ready for us and we checked in and heaved a sigh of relief to be safely settled. Not wanting to remove the trailer from the truck we walked to a McDonald’s almost next door for a 2:00 lunch. As the afternoon wore on we were in contact with Sallie and Jim, who had driven south on I75, and found themselves stopped dead in traffic at 1:00 a few miles south of Berea, KY. We also found out that Mary Anne and John Larzelere had gotten as far as Corbin, KY coming north from Florida on I75 and gotten off the freeway at 11:30 to wait it out. We walked to a Taco Bell just beyond the McDonald’s for dinner.  The snow continued until about 7:00 and then quit in Louisville, with about 5” on the ground. Around 9:00 I talked to Mary Anne who said it was still snowing in Corbin and John was skeptical whether they would be able to leave tomorrow, and doubted they’d make it home for him to take Duncan to the MSU/Maryland basketball game. At 9:40 I finally called Sallie and they had just started rolling, but very slowly. She just hoped to get off the freeway and find an open truck stop or someplace to use the bathroom and she thought they might just sleep in the car and continue on. Despite our relative inactivity it had been an exhausting day and so we went to bed early. We planned on having breakfast with Tom and Mary Ann Sherby at 8:00 and hoped that I65 would be clear enough for us to continue on Saturday to Atlanta, as originally planned. 

The truck gathers snow but it wasn't too bad.