The Great American Christmas Road Trip - Part 1 (Vancouver to Seattle, Washington)

Warning, this is a long posting but an interesting one (well at least I think it is) non the less. It's split into several parts for your reading pleasure.

I left for Sacramento, California from Vancouver, Canada two weeks ago to visit the lady friend's parents for Christmas. We decided to drive down. A 15 to 16 hour drive. No problem says I. We'll do it in a day... was I ever wrong. It ended up taking us 3 days to get to our destination in California.

On the night before we were meant to leave it decided to snow quite heavily all day (as can be seen from the picture of the view from our balcony window).



This resulted in the car being buried in about a foot if not more of snow the next morning. We had to dig the car out and even then we had to push it out from the curb since the snow had it stuck in good. Little did I know that this was the start of a lot more pushing out of snow to come. We had contemplated on getting snow chains for the trip but decided against it at the last moment thinking that we wouldn't need them once we got out of Vancouver. Big mistake.

From the outset the weather was not our friend. There was snow and ice all the way from Vancouver, through to Seattle continuing all the way into most of Oregon; And just when we thought we had made it through the worse of it with the Californian state line in site the snow got us again. More about that later.


(The Road out of Vancouver)

On a "normal" day the drive to the Canadian/US border from Vancouver would take 30 to 40 minutes. Then it would just be a simple case of staying on the I-5 highway for a leisurely cruise all the way down into California. On this day the drive to the border took us an hour and a half and when we hit the US side the snow and ice on the highway was so bad we literally had to travel at 20 to 30 mph max. It just felt really strange going so slow on a highway but I'm very glad we did.

We managed to spin off the road a couple of times. The first time was when we were on our way to Seattle. The idiot driver in front of us decided to inexplicably slam on their brakes despite the fact that there was not a single car or turn ahead of him/her. They somehow miraculously managed not to slide or spin (if they did slide I might have seen it as them just slowing down). This caused us to slam on our brakes to avoid a head on crash. Instead of stopping, the car just kept on sliding towards the car in front of us. Fortunately we were a good 6 car lengths if not more away from him at this stage and we were only traveling at about 20 mph or so and we were the only 2 cars on the highway at that time. We tried turning the wheel at the last minute to avoid a crash but this just made the car spin. The result of this was we spun off the road. Of course the idiot in front of us was oblivious to this and simply just sped up again and went on his/her merry way. Luckily we didn't spin too far into the snow bank so we could easily enough back out again without anyone having to get out and push.

We had to stop off to fill up the tank and our bellies before we hit Seattle and this resulted in more getting stuck in the snow and pushing. The petrol station we tried pulling into was so deeply covered in snow that we got stuck trying to get into it and then again when we tried to get out. It took myself, a friend who was traveling with us who we were dropping off in Seattle and some other people at the station to push the car to the pump. We left the car sitting at the pump as we ran across the road to grab a quick bite to eat... but not before stopping to help push several other cars who had gotten stuck trying to get into the petrol station. We eventually decided to play dumb to all the other cars otherwise we would have been there all night pushing cars in and out of the petrol station never making it that 20/30 odd yard to the burger joint.

So, what should have been a 3 hour trip from the Canadian/US border to Seattle took us 6 and a bit hours. We decided to stay the night in Seattle at the friend's place and continue the trip in the morning. There was a lot more pushing and getting stuck in the snow inbetween that I've skipped over.


(Setting out on Seattle roads - there's a road under there somewhere)
In the morning we continued our trip but this time it was just the two of us. Once we got onto the Seattle freeway it was surprisingly snow and ice free. The snow ploughs had obviously done their jobs that morning. Then we hit Oregon and it all started again.