Stranded In The Snow

 Sunday afternoon we left bright, sunny and clear Provo and headed north toward Layton to visit a family from Brett's mission. As we got past the point of the mountain there were some raindrops, but nothing big, then as we reached downtown Salt Lake a huge snow storm hit. It came out of nowhere and then our adventure began.

As we left our apartment that afternoon Brett said he was going to get a new set of front tires this coming week as the tread was gone. Well we found ourselves in an unexpected snowstorm, on a Sunday afternoon in Utah. There were no cars on the freeway to clear the snow and our tires were in no shape for the weather. Before we knew it the snow was in control of our car and we slid into the side of the freeway. Luckily we were going slow and no other cars were close enough to hit us. We checked the car and there were just a few scratches.

The storm that came out of nowhere! This was about 10 minutes in!

We decided to get off the freeway at the next exit, we inched our way along slowly, but the snow just kept getting worse and again we slid into the side of the freeway, this time hitting a lot harder. We checked the damage and amazingly we just added some more scratches, we were convinced it was a lot worse.

Lucas slept through both collisions!

 Eventually we got off the freeway and made our way down to Rose Park aka "Steenblikville" (we have a lot of extended family that live there as the area was built up by Steenbliks) and stopped at a Smith's parking lot. We made phone calls and contemplated driving the 8 miles to Walmart to get our tires changed right then. After about an hour in the parking lot we decided to have Brett's Uncle come and get us so we could wait out the storm at their house. But the storm got so bad that it took him about an hour to get to us. We grabbed everything from the car and started out to their house, as we crawled along the freeway Semi trucks and multiple cars were sliding, stuck and facing the wrong direction. A couple of times Brett had to get out and push cars to get them moving again.

By the time we arrived at the house we realized we weren't going anywhere until morning so we set up base for the night. Lucas was so excited to be out of the car after 4 hours that he was running around everywhere and it took us until 12:30am to get him to sleep. Eventually morning came and we ventured to find our car, this took about another hour due to the amount of snow and the fact that most of the roads hadn't been cleared yet.

We accumulated about 4 inches of snow in an hour

Our car was buried when we came back the next morning

When we got to our car Brett and his Uncle spent about 20 minutes digging it our of the snow. We loaded all our stuff in and set out. We started off slow and the visibility was pretty bad due to other cars spraying snow slush. But as we hit Thanksgiving Point we saw the sun again and the roads became bone dry.

We made it home around 11am and were so grateful! What was planned to be a simple day with friends turned out to be quite a disaster. Thankfully we are very blessed and had not only Brett's Aunt and Uncle ready and willing to save us, we had others on standby ready to leave as soon as they got our call. It was scary and frustrating and very unexpected, but in the words of Elder Wirthlin we had to "Come What May and Love It". And on the bright side we got to hang out with family we hadn't seen since before Christmas :) We are very blessed and I know we were being watched over because we could have gotten into a terrible accident. It was so much scarier to be in an accident when Lucas was in the car, thankfully he was asleep and is none the wiser.

As we came home and headed past the point of the mountain it was bone dry!

We kept ourselves occupied whilst stranded in the parking lot!