to the airport and back

.

Retrieving someone from a plane arriving at 8:00 am meant getting up much earlier than we usually do.

We were faced with a number of quandries. Today is not a good day for driving. Take the minivan, which handles better in snow, but is old? Its spritzers were declining to spritz, which decided us for the little car, which is only one year old (to the minivan's 11) and whose spritzers are working fine.

Then -- leave one person at home, to check on the web to see where the offspring ends up? Once we learned her plane had taken off, we decided to both go.

Then -- which way to go? Go around south of the airport to the Northwest terminal (where she will come in) or go through the airport to get there? We took the southern route; not sure if that was better or not, but it was passable. The airport was very thoroughly plowed out; going through probably would have been fine, too.

You can almost make out that we are about to drive under US23, the road we took to get home from Mt. Vernon, Ohio. Traffic is moving 30-40 mph. Not bad, considering.





We were glad it wasn't the east-bound lanes that were almost at a stand-still, due to a car stopped partly in the road.....





The west-bound lanes were backed up for miles.





Shortly after the previous shot the snowplows got on the road in front of us. We loooove snowplows.....

We heard from our daughter, as we were about half-way to the airport, that her plane had landed. We were glad to know that, having had visions of arriving at the airport to discover her plane had been re-routed. Somewhere. Everything for hundreds of miles around here has been affected by this storm........

It took her about exactly as long to collect her bag and get to the pick-up point as it took us to get there.


Now we are on the way home. You can tell how much lighter it was then than when we were going east. I have no idea why, but the left lane was bare and apparently dry.





The snow was blowing across the bare lane in interesting ways.





Then it wasn't bare any more. It's very odd how different the weather can be at the airport from at home. We only live 23 miles from the airport.......





We got home without incident, and then shoveled out the drive and the walk (we'd just bulled our way out, as we left). I decided to take the minivan to the dealer to see if we could get the spritzer fixed. The minivan is parked on the street. I had to rock a bit, back and forth, to get out, but no problem. The big roads were ok, and the neighborhood roads were passable, if you watched where you were going and stayed in the tire tracks someone else had already made for you.....

It turned out that the hose that delivers washer-fluid to the windshield was frozen at the base of the reservoir. Pouring hot water over it took care of that, and they topped me up with fresh fluid. For free. We were really sorry to not buy the little car from this dealership (which is only a tiny bit farther than a mile from home), but they didn't have any nice little cars that get 33mpg.

Alas.

So now we're all home, safe and sound, and warm and dry, and with enough to eat.

Surely wish all of those things were true for everyone everywhere...................

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