Wednesday, November 17, 2010

We Made It Home ... Not an Easy Feat!

We had a great time in Pittsburgh although our teams lost - Steelers on Sunday night and Penguins on Monday night - and I picked up a bad cold while there.  Trying to get back home ... well, that was a different story!  We left Pittsburgh about 11:30 a.m. expecting to get home around 6:30 pm.  Things were going great until about 4:00 when we got to the I-77 turn off of I-81 in Virginia.  The interchange was closed so we went up to the next exit; did a U-turn and got back on the highway hoping to get onto I77 from the north.  Nooooo!  Sonny went into a gas station to ask about an alternate route.  They gave us directions through small towns on a 2-lane road along with everyone else.  We never went over 35 mph!  When we got to the next place where we could get onto I-77, it was also blocked.  We asked the police that were there and were told I-77 was closed all the way to the NC line and would be closed until midnight probably.  So on we went toward Mt. Airy.  We hadn't gone far when there was a wreck about 5 cars in front of us.  So we were stopped on this little dinky road for 1 1/2 hours waiting for it to get cleaned up!!  Finally the tow trucks got the cars out of the way and we continued down the mountain.  We finally arrived home about 10:30 tonight.  We were both so glad to get out of the car!!!  We kept hearing different stories about why the highway was closed - from 50 car accident to 100 car accident to cows being involved and on the highway!  I just did a Google Search and found out that the wrecks started this morning around 11:30 on the southbound side of I77 involving several vehicles and a few minutes later there was another accident within a couple of miles of the first one resulting in a couple of deaths.  Then around 5 pm there were more wrecks in the northbound lane.  State police have determined that a total of 75 vehicles were involved in multiple pile ups, half of them commercial,  due to dense fog.

I am very thankful that we were in the right place at the right time and were not involved in any of those wrecks.  Guess there was an angel on our dashboard on this trip.

I hope you enjoyed the Blog Hop this weekend sponsored by Operation Write Home.  If you didn't get to all the posts, here's a link to thumbnails from each post.  There's also a digital "freebie" there for you!

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