I headed back to San Jose on Wednesday morning. Darn good thing, too, since if I had stayed another day, they likely would have had frogs falling from the sky.
After the massive rains on Tuesday, I fell asleep listening to the windstorm that was coming through in the middle of the night. That should have tipped me off--nothing comes through like that than a cold front.
So, I'm up at 5 AM, turn on KOMO, and find out there's *snow*.
Oh, we're not talking about snow in the passes or on the hills. Nope, we're talking snow at sea level. And in Everett (about 20 mi to the north), it's sticking.
Whee
Now I have a real reason to hurry up and get out of Dodge. I packed up the car and headed down the I-5 for SeaTac. I decided not to deal with the 99 because I couldn't get a road report on it, and if there was a closure, I didn't want to have to deal with figuring out a detour.
About a mile south of downtown, the snow kicked in. Nope, it didn't stick, but there's that *sound* when you realize that the precip has suddenly gotten really, really soft. Add to that some serious standing water, and you have some really nasty driving conditions.
Luckily, everyone around me knew how to drive in messes. If this was happening in SJ, you'd see the application of the old "you start to hydroplane at the sqrt (tire pressure)*9", which, for the mathematically non-inclined, is usually somewhere between 45-54 MPH. Controlled spinouts in a big, empty, supermarket parking lot are fun. On an eight-lane highway? Nope.
So, off to the airport, through security in plenty of time to get to the gate, get a big bottle of water, and on to the plane. Now you *know* this is not going to be a ha-ha flight, since we're going to be flying back through that front.
And it wasn't--the plane was a 737, which unlike the MD80 flying rock, has a nasty tendency to shimmy. And boy-howdy, did it. We finally broke free of the front with 30 minutes left in the flight. I have to hand it to the flight staff--they went out of their way to keep people happy during the flight.
Landed in SJ at 10, and after a short taxi ride, I made it to a meeting at 10:30.
The rest of the day it was "You flew in from Seattle. This morning. Okay...."
Posted by lsefton at November 20, 2003 09:37 PM