Every year my family goes down to Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, TN in December. They have lots of christmas light displays and outlet malls...great place to go in December! Last year we didn't make it down because we went on a cruise right after exams let out. This year we've moved the cruise to the second week in January, so now we were able to go down to Gatlinburg the weekend of the 18th of December. We planned on leaving at 4:00pm because I needed to work, but since there was a big storm coming, we decided to leave at 2:00pm. The closer it got, and the more inches were tacked on to how much snow we were going to get, the departure time moved to noon. However, we didn't end up leaving until 2:00 because of some things that happened and people weren't ready.

We left right around 2:00pm and it had just started to snow, and it was already sticking.

By the time we got 10 miles down the road on 460 next to Christiansburg, it was already sticking on the roads and then some!

We were able to get on 81S, but heard on the radio that there was an accident at mile marker 109 and one at mile marker 64. My dad got off 81S and went through Christiansburg to avoid the first accident. At one point we were at a stop light where we were pointed down the hill, and a pick up truck coming up the hill from the other direction was coming up sideways. At this point I started getting nervous and scared. We weren't even out of the next town over and it was getting bad. My dad drove us from Christiansburg through Radford and got us back on 81S. Everyone was driving slowly, and I knew it was going to take us forever to get down to Gatlinburg. Mile Marker 92 had a flipped over car and lots of cars that had slid off to the side. On the other side, two trucks weren't able to get up a hill and blocked off all the traffic behind them.

At 4:00pm we got to mile marker 70 were we hit the traffic from the accident at mile marker 64. It was stopped. My brother got out of the road to clear the ice off the wipers.

We just sat and sat. A few times we saw a Tech Student take their dog out for a potty break and some exercise. Great entertainment, the dog was hilarious!

Then it started to get dark...

And darker...

We got out to stretch our legs and a truck driver called us over, he told us there were tractor trailers that couldn't get up a hill ahead and they couldn't get snow plows through to clear the snow off the roads. At that point we started considering leaving. There was a road between 81S and 81N a few car lengths ahead of us, and we had already seen a couple cars go up and through it. We were hungry and frustrated and ready to abandon the trip. We had been "driving" for 5 hours at that point, and been in the stand still traffic for 3 of those 5 hours. So we did drive up to the through road on the shoulder (yay 4 wheel drive!) and went a mile back up 81N to Wytheville to get something to eat. We ate at Ruby Tuesdays and they ended up closing while we were there because it was getting so bad out. Back on the road, it took us about 2, 2.5 hours to get back to Blacksburg. Thanks to twitter, we avoided 81N where you get on 460. That was backed up, we got on 11N instead in Dublin and made it to Blacksburg finally!

It was great to be home, however we were disappointed that we missed out on the Gatlinburg trip this weekend, but we plan to go on January 2nd now...depending on the weather of course.

~Taylor~