The long (but safe) journey home in the 2014 Snowpocalypse in Durham

I just made it home, whew! I left at 1:15 and a 20 min drive took a dangerous hour. Thank goodness I have an Subaru Outback w/AWD. There were abandoned cars, school buses sliding, cars sliding down hills. I took side roads because 147 was a parking lot.

The snow was falling fast and piled up quickly. Now that I'm home, I see on the news that it's a disaster out there. I was fortunate. I left a bunch of cars on a steep hill in the dust. They were spinning out, had flashers on, it was awful. Worst driving in snow I've seen since moving back in 1989. We're expecting an ice storm later, so we can only hope that we don't lose power.

Some pix:

Outside the window at Brightleaf at 1PM:



Really slow moving traffic on University Dr. 147 freeway out of control already so I bypassed it a 20 minute drive has now taken me 45 minutes and I'm about halfway home.





I took side roads, and got on Cornwallis next to the projects, correctly thinking there wouldn't be much traffic there. Because of the Subaru I got up the huge hill next to the cemetery, where people were spinning out, sliding everywhere trying to get to Fayetteville Road. This pic is once I was on Fayetteville Road which is really slow but passable. I actually saw a school bus struggling down this road.



Another school bus; scary here near Barbee Road it's starting to really ice up.



HOME!!!! Thanks to the Subaru and experience knowing the back roads in Durham!



NOTE: I wasn't texting while driving. My phone's Android OS allows you to dictate rather than use the virtual keyboard. Quite handy (and accurate). And the pix were taken while I was stopped (which, as you might imagine, was quite often).