We woke up to 22° this morning and everything was coated with ice. The weather forecast indicated that it would rise above freezing by noon, so we decided to wait around until after lunch and then decide whether to stay or go.
After breakfast, it was off to the new showers. Unlimited hot water, good shower heads and no button pushing to keep it flowing. A heated shower room as well. Camping life was good—for the moment.
As the morning wore on, the campground roads dried up, although the grass was still quite covered in ice. After lunch, with the temperature at just about freezing, we decided that dry roads weren't a problem, so we packed up and headed back to the Interstate. The local road back to the highway was mostly dry, so we were hoping to get well into Louisiana, if not all the way to Texas.
That feeling didn't last long. At the first overpass we met ice. It covered all the lanes. At the second it was more of the same, then there was an ice-covered bridge with a slight curve. We would go from 55 to 10, crawling over the bridges—and there were lots of them, about one every mile or two. By the time we got to the fifth or sixth one and saw the four dented pickup trucks sitting together in the median after the bridge, with people milling around, it was time to find an exit. Looking at the map, it looked like the highway crossed roads, creeks and rivers all the way to New Orleans, at least.
They don't (or can't) do anything about the highways around here in cold conditions, except wait for them to melt. At home, the roads would have been sanded and salted last night and would have been perfectly dry this morning.
We weren't really concerned about our own ability to handle the conditions, but weren't convinced about the other guy. We didn't really need to get wiped out by some yahoo in a pickup truck on an icy bridge.
We exited at the first Flying-J, with the intent of staying there. While sitting in their lot, I saw that there was an RV park on the other side of the interstate. We decided that heat, WiFi and showers (and maybe fewer bright lights at night) were preferable to the Flying-J lot, so off to the Bay Berry RV park we went. Let's just say we should have stayed at Davis Bayou, but who knew. We had never seen roads like this before.
The weather is supposed to be better tomorrow, sunny and rising into the high 40s, so we will try again. It has just gotten barely above freezing at 3pm, enough for the ice to melt off Speedy, so maybe the bridges will be clear by mid-morning tomorrow. We might just make it to Aransas by Saturday, when our site will be available.
No bird-of-the-day today, and judging by the eBird postings, it has been too cold to look for birds at Aransas as well.
Our aborted travel today was a mere 34 miles.
No comments:
Post a Comment