What I saw of the Oklahoma ice storm

On the way down to my Uncle Bill's funeral I ran into freezing drizzle, starting south of Des Moines. The defroster, while it was heating the cab to about 100°, couldn't keep the ice off the windshield. I had to slow way down to give it a chance to keep up. When I got down to 35 mph, and had stopped for the third time to scrape it clear (and Liina said, "I gotta go potty!"), I decided we'd just take a motel for the night.

So we stopped at the Super 8 in Bethany, Missouri. I had seriously considered stopping at The Sundowner Motel in Cameron, because it was the first motel I ever stayed in, and I was almost overcome by nostalgia for it. But, finally, I was convinced that the temperature was going to continue to drop faster than I could head south, so I'd never get ahead of the weather...another thing that worried me, was that somebody with more of an angle to their windshield, and, therefore, less trouble seeing through it, would be driving overconfidently and rear-end me...and "I gotta go potty" was the last straw.

The next morning the drizzle continued, but with warmer temps, the defroster could keep up. The roads were always okay - their ice treatment, Iowa's and Missouri's seems to be very effective, though, even so, I had to be careful to stay in the ruts as I neared Carthage, Mo.

So that was the experience that told me not to try to drive home on Tuesday.

Here are the pix I took Sunday, after things had been sitting for several hours in warmer weather.

All right, that's nothing like my Mom's pix of the Ferris coming through the Duluth Entrance about the same time of year after a storm in the mid-70's (or my buddy Dutch's mom's pix of his dad's boat, the McCurdy, which came in right behind the Ferris - both of 'em looked like they were made of icicles).

I want to reiterate, this is the worst that Muskogee saw. Tulsa and Oklahoma City got the full brunt of the big storm. (Though Muskogee was hit by one equally as bad last year, though more localized.) I took these pix of my Mom's yard on Sunday:

Sorry about the scrap lumber. It wouldn't be there if it were my place. And it wasn't when Mom was ambulatory, either. I need to spend some time there next summer. I need to go down there with my list of things to do.

Here's the front yard:


Muskogee wasn't hit at all by the big storm, thank God.

My boss wasn't sounding very sympathetic when I call and told her that I wasn't going to drive up through it. Though, when I talked to her today, she told me that, after she talked to me she listened to the news and found out that it was, indeed, a big deal. As I hinted, I wouldn't have thought of it as much of a deal, myself, if I hadn't tried to drive through a minor precursor of it a couple days before.