My Old Kentucky Road Trip

I had a lot of time to think about cold weather last week. Locked up for most of four days by a crippling ice storm and thundersnow, I kept saying "it's not that bad."

Actually it was pretty bad and many Texans were unjustly mocked by out of towners from Pittsburgh and Green Bay for their reaction to the storm.
I ventured out each day and managed to get home without a dent but the odds were against me. It wasn't the first time I challenged those odds.

On a Sunday afternoon in January of 1978 I set out from Bloomfield, New Jersey for the 21-hour trek back to Murray, KY - my old Kentucky (college) home.

First let me explain a few things about my car. It was a faded green 1957 Chevy that came pre-dented and pre-rusted when I bought it two years earlier. The engine was smooth but the big car bounced along on worn shocks and ball joints that made it drift across the lanes. This forced the driver to constantly adjust the steering wheel to keep it aimed straight down the highway.

The flurries started about 20 miles into the trip but returning home would have been a defeat for this college senior. I was soon climbing hills in eastern Pennsylvania as the flurries turned to snow. I swung up north to the gritty town of Scranton to pick up a passenger and before we hit the next town south, the blizzard hit.

About the car again... the windshield wiper operated off of a vacuum pump that would lose pressure when the engine was stressed. In other words, accelerating up a hill would cause the wipers to stop until I released the gas pedal.

Facing near white out conditions, my passenger was leaning outside the window wiping the windshield with a snow brush while I slammed on the gas and let go intermittently. There was only 16 hours to go.

At the bottom of a long mountain hill outside of Wilkes Barre on Interstate 81, I did a 360 and fortunately struck nothing but snow. We shook it off and then caled it a day at the next exit. We stayed at a nearby relative's house and started out after sunrise for the other 917 miles.
The sun was shining but the temperature hovered near zero and the highway was covered with deep snow. We followed in the tracks of tractor trailers although we saw more than a few rolled on their side in the medians. Thirteen hours later we had travelled about 450 miles on snow covered roads. We called it a night in Columbus, Ohio.

One final word about the car - the floorboards in front had rusted out and only the original thin floor mats protected our feet from the cold air and moisture. The breezes were enough to numb the toes down there.

Tuesday morning we found the roads similar to our Texas roads last week - covered with ice. We rarely found dry pavement and crept 330 miles across the Western Kentucky Parkway in 10 hours - that's an average of 33 mph.

The 19-hour drive had taken 27 hours and still ranks as the toughest road trip I've ever endured.
As a footnote - we arrived in Murray, Kentucky just in time to enjoy several weeks of ice covered roads and cancelled classes. The winter of 1978 had just begun.