Snow Driving

By: Carolyn Jiang and Olivia Nordstrom

Our experiences driving in the snow:

This past weekend, the basketball team went to Berlin for a basketball tournament. We were an hour and a half away and I decided to drive myself. All of this was during the middle of an oncoming snowstorm. As I left Cleveland and started approaching Amish country, the roads got worse and worse. I was driving on hilly country roads covered in layers of ice and snow. I began to slow down and the sky grew darker making it harder to see. But I made it to the hotel safely. The next morning when we left, the roads were in even worse condition. There were more layers of ice covering the streets and my car began to slip. My hour and a half car ride home turned into a two-hour and a half car ride. I know most people think that driving in the snow is terrifying, but I genuinely enjoyed it. I drifted around every corner because of the ice and it was kind of cool. Other than that though, I dislike snow a lot because it is frozen water that later melts and makes your clothes wet. 

I woke up pretty early on Monday morning to go swim but as I looked out the window I noticed I could not find where the sidewalk ended and the road began. The entire block was covered in a foot of snow with no way of moving. I postponed my swimming until the roads had been plowed. My parents shoveled and plowed the driveway to have a way out of the house. The next step was digging the cars out of the snow. Once we had a way out of the house, my mom took me to swim. She didn’t want me to drive as some roads were still bad, and intersections were impossible. We were able to drive without any bad consequences, however, we saw cars stuck and fishtailing. Something I noticed was that people were ignoring lights. At one intersection, it was taking forever to change lights (in the sense that something was wrong), so we saw a snowplow run the red light. Later at a different intersection, I saw another car run a red light after sitting at the light for a long time. I’m not sure why this was happening- I think something with the amount of snow affected the traffic light’s ability to properly function and no one is about to sit at a light forever. I think people need to be careful in those situations, and also with driving in the snow in general.