Winter 2004 Snow Storm on Highway I-64 in Illinois and Indiana

In December 2004 and January 2005 I took a road trip of over 3,000 miles to see my friends and family before moving to Australia.  All said 12 states were visited and the cities were Phoenix, Albuquerque, Kansas City, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, Lynchburg (home of Jack Daniels), Nashville, and Dallas.  However the trip from St. Louis to Cincinnati is the one worth telling. 

Shortly after leaving a perfectly clear St. Louis at 6:00 AM the snow blowing across highway I-64 turned out to be only a taste of the rest of the day.

Slowly the snow and the ice got thicker on the road.

And thicker until the whole highway was just a block of ice

Then the signs of less fortunate travelers started showing up all over the place.

Then it was my turn to "park" my car in a snow bank.  Yes, that's right I wrecked the Malibu.

I was driving with my left wheels on the narrow black strip when a 18 wheeler was tailgating me, so I moved into what would be the right lane on a clear day.  For a few seconds after the semi passed I was blinded by the snow kicked up by its tires.  During that short period of being blind, the car hit a patch of ice and started to skid.  I had a 50/50 chance of guessing which way I was skidding. So guessed.... wrong.  Instead of turning into the skid, I turned away and the car immediately went spinning out of control.  After doing a few 360's the car came into contact with the snow bank going backwards and rather quickly came to a very rough stop, just short of going down a hill and into a creek.

About an hour later a tow truck came to pluck me out of the bank, while the nice sheriff made sure the car and tow truck didn't get hit.  I say nice sheriff because he didn't give me a ticket for being an idiot.  The car had no damage and acted like nothing happened.

So at 11:00 AM I drove another mile down the highway and left Illinois to find that Indiana had not even bothered to plow any of the snow on I-65 Eastbound.

At 11:04 just 4 miles over the boarder the traffic came to a halt.

At 12:30 we were all in the same spot.  Little did I know that it would take 13 hours to drive 21 miles.  The National Guard was taking Hummers to rescue stranded motorists who ran out of gas trying to keep warm, while the Red Cross and local Fire fighters handed out food rations to cars with kids.  News helicopters were circling all day long.

The high for the day was 10F

While there was a 25 mile backup and no snow plows on the east bound side, snow plows ran all day long on the westbound side.  Some drivers were less than happy at this.  I could care less, my biggest issue was having to pee in a bottle while stopped on a bridge over the black river.

Every few hours the line would move as the National Guard would move cars with no gas to the side of the road.  One Hummer even got stuck in the median.  All good fun.

Semi's littered the road on both sides.

One has to wonder what the on line tracking status said for the christmas packages in this UPS truck.