Okay, I'm going to preface this by noting that we make this drive every year. We know how long it takes, and we know to leave a few hours of flex time for traffic. We've also done it in bad weather, so that wasn't new either.
Tampa to Long Island. In a car. With a teenager. For Christmas.
The drive down couldn't have been any more perfect. Good weather, not much traffic. We beat our previous best time. The visit itself was amazing. I love seeing the family, and it was just nice to be back home for a few days. I've lived on Long Island for 6 years now, and I still hate the cold and snow, and I still consider myself a Floridian. I was born and bred there, and I'll probably always be a native. So getting home for the holidays is always nice, and even more so now that I have a husband and step-son who love it as much as I do, and whom my family loves too.
But the trip back home was bad. Hellishly bad. So bad, that both my husband and I were on the brink of synchronized nervous breakdowns by the time we finally got home.
First of all, the traffic. I think the whole world has gone insane. It's like people get behind the wheel, and immediately start trying to play bumper cars. We were in more near-miss accidents than I have ever been in before. People not paying attention, people cutting people off, people weaving between lanes... And while, by some minor miracle, we managed to avoid being in an accident ourselves, there were many others who weren't so lucky. It felt like we were hitting another dead stop because of an accident every few miles. Seriously. It took us SIX HOURS LONGER to get home than it has ever taken us before.
Second, was the weather. Now, in the southern states, it was beautiful. There was a blizzard that had gone through the whole east coast the day before, but in the south, whatever snow they got was either melted or meticulously cleaned off the highways. So people don't have that excuse for all the accidents. However, once we hit NJ and NY, all bets were off. Yes, they got more snow, but seriously, it's like they've never heard of something called a snow plow. I've never seen a plow job this bad. On major highways, there was barely one lane cleared out of three, and even that was so slick with black ice, we didn't dare get above about 30 mph. My car has 4-wheel drive, so that helped, but we hit quite a few patches of ice and started to skid. My husband was driving and recovered us, but we saw probably 20 cars who weren't so lucky and were stranded in snowbanks along the highways. One one exit, it hadn't even been plowed at all, and there were 4 cars all stuck there, with people standing around outside staring at each other. Keep in mind, this is at around 1am, after a full DAY had gone by since the snow fell.
So we finally get home, frazzled but in one piece. It's about 1:30am at that point, and all we want to do is sleep. We had been up for a little more than 30 hours at that point. My husband was driving because he hates being the passenger, and I can't sleep in cars. The plan was to bring the luggage upstairs, drop it in the kitchen, and everyone go pass out.
It didn't work out that way.
We live in a building owned by my husband's father. He has a real estate office downstairs, and we live upstairs. It works out nice, because we pay less in rent that we could anywhere else on the Island, and he has someone always there to keep an eye on things. When it snows, usually we're home, so my husband will shovel not only our section, but he'll walk around and shovel the office as well, even though their entrance is on the other side of the building. It's common courtesy. So, silly us, we assumed they would do the same since we weren't home for this one. Not so much. We get home to discover no one had told the men hired to shovel to do anything with our area. Our gate was completely blocked, and of course the snow shovel is in the house by the front door, since that's usually where it's needed. We had to dig out the gate with hands and feet to get it open. Once it's open, we find the snow has piled up almost to my waist. We had to wade through it, and then, of course, dig again to get the stairs going up to the door and the door itself clear enough to get in the house. At this point, it's about 2am.
Emptying the car is out of the question, so it's decided we'll actually dig out and do all that after everyone gets some sleep. My husband had taken the day off to recover from the drive, but I was supposed to be in to work in a few hours. I had a personal day I wasn't planning to use, but at that point, I knew even if I did make it in, I would be useless, so I called and left a voicemail that I would see everyone the following day.
We finally make it upstairs, and the apartment is FREEZING. The heat is connected to the downstairs, so I'm pretty sure it was just knocked out at some point, and since we weren't there to notice it, it wasn't discovered until later. Fortunately, all four cats were all okay. That fur comes in handy. We have a little electric space heater we plugged in, so things started to heat up a bit. We strip out of the clothes we had been in for 30+ hours and all we want at that point is to fall asleep. But no. The mattress was frozen solid. I didn't even know a mattress could freeze. It's one of those foam styles, and it was hard as a board. We had to sit around and wait for the space heater to warm things up enough to at least start to get it soft again before we could go to sleep. We ended up laying down when it was still hard, but at that point, being uncomfortable was less important than just laying our bodies down.
We finally get some sleep, but I wake up far earlier the next morning than I had planned because all the stress and wading through snow let the bug I had been fighting off for weeks finally take hold. I had a fever, I couldn't breathe, and my throat was sore. By the end of the day, I had no voice. But that didn't mean I cold rest, because the car was still packed. The boys dug us out, with my step-son doing a lot of the work. Ahh, to be 15 again. And we all pitched in getting everything upstairs, but then we had to unpack and get everything put away. And of course, there's really no food in the house since we hadn't wanted to leave a bunch of stuff to go bad while we were gone. I finally made some soup last night because I was starving, and sat on the couch sipping theraflu until about 8pm. At that point, I was still exhausted and feeling so bad, that I went back to bed. Unfortunately, this cold kept me up since I wasn't all that comfortable and couldn't breathe, but I did manage to get a little sleep.
Everyone is back to work today, but I have a feeling it will take us through the weekend to completely recover. We're all still frazzled and sore and tired from that long, stressful drive. Next year, we're already talking about starting to look for a flight early enough to actually get something we can afford, and barring that, we might just go with Amtrak.
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