Thundersnow.

Honestly, we had the worst commute ever yesterday. Jason says to call it "harrowing," and I think that, as the person who had to drive the worst parts of it, it's more than fair to let him decide how to describe it. Let's just call this a collaborative entry. You'd think after Snowpocalypse (or Snowmaggedon, the names are interchangeable now) that this city might have figured something out about handling a snow storm. But no. They have not.

We all knew the snow was coming--we woke up to icy slush, and all the warnings pointed to a brief respite during the afternoon before 5-10 inches descended on us. The East Coast has been pummeled with bad storms this winter, but somehow Washington had escaped them all until yesterday. Right on time at 3:00 p.m., the rain started, and right on time at 3:00 p.m., the government announced a two-hour early release, and right on time at 3:00 p.m., every worker in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area spilled out into their cars and onto the streets. Rush hour turned into rush minute.

We ventured out right into the middle of it. Due to a last-minute meeting (people who were “had to get to the airport,” ha), I didn’t spill out into my car at 4:00 p.m. to go pick him up two miles away. I finally got to him at about 5:10 p.m. I thought we’d hit the worst of it until we got onto I-66 for the last few miles and what is usually the easiest part of our commute. My relief at finally being out of DC (and giving Jason the wheel) was short-lived, however. I-66 was a string of brake lights, and as the rain turned to snow and the snow turned to ice, that string started to blink a bit as cars began to fishtail down the road. An oversized commuter-bus jack-knifed across both lanes of traffic, slowing the mind-numbing crawl to a complete stop for a while, and finally we discovered that up ahead it had snowed so much that they'd already shut down lanes so that only one was still open. Lovely.

We’d only had to go one exit on I-66, so when we finally reached it after an hour and a half (note: total drive time at this point is 2:30), we were feeling a bit reckless, so Jason bravely gunned it up the off-ramp. We cheered…and then realized that, no matter how we came at it, another steep hill stood between us and our house.

Our first plan was thwarted when two power lines came down right in front of us. Our second plan forced us back into painful traffic where we sat for another hour, just a mile and a half from our house. People had already started abandoning their cars in the middle of the road, having run out of gas or just simply given up and walked home—and don't think we didn't consider it. Finally we reached the road that goes to our condo, and we decided to make a break for it.

Jason seriously deserves a medal for Gutsiest Driving, 2011. We watched as at least three cars ahead of us started up the hill and slid backwards, but when there was a space, he gunned it and maneuvered his way past them, doing everything he could to keep the wheels spinning. At the top he let out a shakey breath and we braced ourselves for the last hill. The snow was wet and thick and landed like a sheet of slushy ice, and when we turned onto the last street an abandoned van sat in the middle of the road, having run out of gas. Jason took a deep breath, laid on the horn, and picked up speed down the hill before gunning it again to go up the last slope. All of my dad's lessons about what to do when the car starts fishtailing came flying back to me as we careened this way and that, narrowly missing one car and a fire hydrant as the wheels threatened to spin out of control. When we finally reached the top of the hill, he laid on the horn again and we flew through the yellow light.

We turned onto our street at 8:15 p.m. Over four hours after I left work.

Jason has this uncanny gift for being able to fall asleep whenever, wherever…something that sort of annoys me when I lay tossing and turning in bed. But last night he was still flush with adrenaline, and plagued by recurring flashes of the horrific drive, it was he who tossed and turned. The only saving grace was that we were together. It would have been terrible to have lived through those hours separated, constantly wondering if the other would survive the night and without means to attempt any sort of rescue.

We took full advantage of the offered delay on coming in this morning, waiting until the ice had turned back into slush before venturing out again. We definitely had a story to tell when we got in to work, but it turns out lots of people had it way worse off—someone was stuck on the GW Parkway for twelve hours, for example, and someone else took a grueling bus ride from the airport to the metro, only to have the metro closed and the bus turn around and go back to the airport. So all in all, only a little room to complain. Besides, we have a sunny getaway only a couple of days away, and we wouldn’t be able to truly appreciate it without miserable weather here, right?!?