The longest trip home that I didn't make

Last night the weather was bad. All of yesterday the weather was bad. When I went to work there were whiteouts, and snowdrifts on the road, which isn't out of the ordinary really. I got to work a little later then usual, as can be expected under the conditions.

I headed out from work around 3:30pm, and drove back North. I heard on the radio about the closure of the 400 highway, the main roadway between Toronto and Barrie, so I switched to the traffic station on the radio to find out the extent of it. The highway had been closed since about 11am due to a 75 car pileup. As I got closer to Newmarket, the traffic got real slow. I decided to get off the main routes, and take the back roads to the Holland River. There are only 2 ways to get across the Holland River, the 400 (which was closed) and Younge Street. The road was a parking lot. After about half an hour I made it across the bridge into town. Tried to take the bypass route, but it was a parking lot too. Every road in town was just crammed with cars, and it wasn't even rush hour. I found a place to park my car, and decided to walk around (much quicker then driving).

After a while I found myself in a Bar with a bunch of other strandee's trying to wait out the traffic. Occassionally we would get people coming in and giving us reports of where they had been, and what is going on. Every road out of town had an accident on it, and police had closed the roads down. I waited until about 8pm, and then decided the only way I was getting out of town was if I went south. Back to Toronto I go!

I headed back to work, had a coffee in Operations, fixed some software bugs they were having, then crashed on a couch in the lounge. When I woke up this morning, I turned on the TV, and the highway was still closed.