Homer

The first weekend of Spring Break we took a spontaneous trip to Homer for the weekend and encountered what is sure to be known as "the Great Blizzard of 10." Homer got about a foot of snow on Thursday and Friday then had a little break Saturday. We drove down Sunday, enjoying a beautiful, clear sunny drive and got there just a few hours before round two of the big snow dump started. We rented a 3 bedroom vacation home with a breathtaking view that worked out great for us and the girls (and apparently it came with its own pet moose who bedded down or a few hours and disappeared under a blanket of fresh snow). My Dad and Kate came out to the house for dinner Sunday night. The snow had already started coming down, and not just floaty little flakes, I mean big, GIANT, fluffy, sticky flakes. It snowed all Saturday night, all day Sunday and was STILL snowing Tuesday morning when we left town. To add insult to injury the wind was blowing like 80 miles and hour and gusting so bad they actually closed the road down to the spit because they were afraid of cars blowing off the road! Schools were closed, alot of businesses were closed and my Dad was plowing up a storm around town. Sycely even got to help run the plow on his truck while he plowed 15 inches of fresh snow from his store parking lot (that was Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning we couldn't even find the driveway it had snowed so much more).
Sycely and I braved the sideways-blowing snow on Monday to do a little shopping. I turned in the wrong driveway on the way back to the rental house and got stuck off the edge of the neighbor's driveway (apparently it hadn't been plowed since the snow started!) Fortunately, I'd packed up all our snow clothes into the back of the car so I got on some snowpants, boots, gloves and a hat and got Sycely (and Elim) bundled up warm and covered them with a blanket, threw Lem's boots into the sled we had in the car and pulled Sycely down the neighbor's driveway, onto the main road and all the way up the steep driveway to our house (while Lem enjoyed watching these crazy hard-core Alaskan antics from the picture windows next door!) It was quite an adventure. My Dad brought his plow truck over and got the Explorer back on the road without too much trouble. Later I watched the one ton plow truck go off their driveway in the same spot while trying to clear their driveway-I didn't feel so bad then :) The snow was so bad and visibility was nonexistent that my Dad and Kate brought some dinner up to the house and then headed straight back down the hill to get home safely asap. Visibility was so bad on their drive down the hill back to town that they had to roll down the window and stick their head's out to try to find the edge of the road!

The weather was just as crazy the next morning, but we decided to brave the storm so to speak and hit the road home. The weather report on the highway didn't look too bad, baring the avalanche around Portage, but that was estimated to be cleaned up long before we'd hit that part of the road. Ironically, the drive through Homer was the worst of it. Once we got about 10 miles out of Homer the skies cleared, the snow stopped and the road weren't at all snowy.

The girls both slept for a good long stretch on the drive home and things were pretty smooth sailing until we got about 2 hours from home. Then we stopped seeing oncoming cars. Then we saw a road closed ahead due to avalanche so we spent some time trying to get cell service and figure out what was going on along the highway. Turns out the first avalanche (north of Girdwood) was cleared but there was a second avalanche (south of Girdwood) so we debated what to do-head toward Seward, keep on toward Anchorage and get as close as we could, hoping it'd be cleared or close to it by the time we got there? So we decided to get as close to home as we could and got almost to Portage-nothing worth doing in Portage was open so we decided to head to Seward and have some dinner there, let the girls have some out of the car time to run around, etc and figured by the time we'd be getting back to Portage again things should be cleared and the highway should be opened back up. So we started toward Seward, got to the cutoff and noticed the highway closed ahead sign wasn't up anymore, so we called traffic info (again) and had Ian check via internet and found out the highway was back open all the way to Anchorage-sheesh! What a run around! Needless to say, it was a very LONG (close to 9 hour) trip home but the girls did amazing, we had lots of snacks and munchies and movies and coloring supplies so everyone held up just fine!