A Scary, Snowy Adventure

For this recent Spring Break, my family and I decided to visit relatives in California. The trip there was fine, but coming back was a disaster. We made it to the mountain pass on I-80 by 2 pm. We were making great time! Then came the traffic. When we stopped, there was no snow on the ground. By the time we moved, there was over a foot of snow. We sat in the same place for 4 hours, and all we did was put chains on and sit in the van worried that we weren't going to make it back to Reno. Then our van stopped working. We were on the verge of panickstricken. After a few agonizing minutes, my parents got the van working again, and a while after that we started moving forward! But then we stopped again right behind a diesel truck that had spun out in front of us and next to another stopped diesel which was also spun out. Not a single snow plow came the whole 6 hours we were stuck there, and the tow trucks we saw passed us by to get to a 40 car pile-up a few miles down the road. After a few more hours, a small 4-wheel drive truck helped pull the stuck diesel in front of us out. It was now dark and the roads were icy and we had a trailer. All we could do was hope we would make it up the hill. We were turned around a few miles up, so we had to go back down to Auburn. It seemed as though we were home-free, but, just our luck, a car zipped by us, and we had to go over to the right of the road. The trailer tire slipped on a patch of ice and brought our whole rig to the right and into the snow. Now we were the ones spun out. With no shovels, we dug out the snow around the tires and used momentum to get back up on the road. And there was much rejoicing. I loved the rain that we met in Auburn; anything was better to snow after that experience! All the hotels were booked from people who had to turn around and got back down the mountain before us, so we had to go all the way back to Sacramento and stay in a hotel there. The next day, we made it over the mountain. And now I am ready to never see another snowflake again!