Why I’m not a meteorologist.
So about the other night, when I was talking about how there was much ado being made about nothing as far as the weather goes.
Forget I said anything about that.
I’m no Jim Cantore (pictured above), the meteorologist-extraordinaire for the Weather Channel. Apparently when snow comes from the sky in huge clumps like it did last night, and the temperature dips below freezing (about 25 degrees, a little colder than I thought it would get), it will stick to the road, no matter how much pretreatment goes into it.
I found this out after driving to Murray with one of my co-workers to cover a girls’ high school basketball game. When we left early in the afternoon, the snow had just started and it wasn’t that bad. When we left about 10:30, it was totally a different story.
The drive usually takes about 45-50 minutes. I know people who have made in 40 minutes. We hit Highway 641, which was coated in about three or four inches of packed snow and slush, and I was driving a scintillating 30 miles per hour. And the snow that was coming down was almost blinding.
We crept along for the first stretch of the drive, which was about 20 miles, before we got on the Purchase Parkway. Because it was an interstate, conditions improved a little bit, and we were able to cruise along at 40.
The drive kept going, with the snow coming down harder and harder, but for some reason, the road conditions continued to improve the closer we got to Paducah. We rolled back to the office just before midnight. The trip took twice as long as it normally would take.
So, the point of this story. I was wrong. And I will never underestimate Mother Nature again. And I won’t put more clips of old Bill Murray movies on here either.
