Welcome to 2020! Our New Years Adventure

(Steven wrote this description of our adventure for Hannah and John and gave me permission to post it here as well for historical purposes. Enjoy!)

So we were invited to go spend New Years Eve with April and Dean. As you may recall, April and Dean live in Wyoming. Now if I were to ask you what was the first thing you thought of when I mention Wyoming, what would you say? What's the first thing that comes to mind? Well, quite possibly the thing you think about Wyoming is "windy". And you would be correct. I even checked the weather before we went and instead of saying 'Sunny' or 'Partly Cloudy' it said 'Windy'. Now April and Dean live about an hour north of Cheyenne and between Cheyenne and their house is pretty much nothing. When we got to Cheyenne there were flashing signs saying "Trucks, RV's, and anything pulling a trailer, don't even think about driving any farther. For the rest of you, may God have mercy on your souls." or something like that. For that next hour drive the wind was pretty wild and crazy. But the best part was that it would sometimes blow the snow off the sides of the road across the road to the point where you couldn't see the road and just had to keep driving straight and hope that the road didn't make any sudden moves. I asked Josh if he wanted to practice driving at all but he said no.

We finally made it to April and Dean's house where the wind was not quite as bad and we were at least able to go inside. For our New Years party we had pizza and cookies and mom made some guacamole (which was good, but probably not as good as if Hannah had made it). Mom and April played the guitar and piano and sang songs. Dean and Josh and Peter played D&D and fought some over-sized sewer rats. I did a cryptic crossword and kept looking at my watch to see if it was midnight yet so we could go to bed because it was late and already past my bedtime. Oh, and we learned that cats aren't the only animals that are stupid enough to chase laser pointers. The Dawes beagle dogs are too! And it was fun because they have hardwood floors and so it took a bit for the dog to get running, and then he couldn't stop very fast and so would often slam into the wall. And the dog kept going and never gave up, even when you could tell he was getting tired. Finally the big moment arrived - the coo-coo clock chimed midnight! Did you know that April and Dean have a real, honest-to-goodness, coo-coo clock? One with chains with weights hanging down that keep it going and a little door that opens and a little birdy comes out and says "coo-coo"? Anyway, it was pretty cool.

Before going to bed though, me and Peter ran outside to the end of their driveway and back just for fun. It was pretty windy outside but somehow we survived.

We slept in the basement and you would think that being in a dark basement after having stayed up past midnight that I would be able to sleep in a bit, but you would be wrong. They had a few basement windows and as soon as some light came through in the morning my body said "time to get up!" and wouldn't be convinced otherwise. Eventually everyone else woke up and we had breakfast (which we probably didn't need since I was still full from all the pizza and cookies and guacamole from the night before). Peter, Dean, Ezri and I played a round of four-person chess on a board that Peter had made (Mom and April helped Ezri). Four-person chess is interesting because any strategy you might have becomes moot by the time three other people have moved and also it is legal to move into check since it is possible for one of the other three players to make a move to remove the threat before they actually take your king. Anyway, it was fun. Dean won.

Finally it was time to go home. We all got in the van and started home. But when we got to the freeway we found that it was closed due to the adverse weather conditions! Hmmm. That might make getting home a little difficult. I still needed to get home because I had to work the next day. So mom pulled out her phone to find another way around. We ended up taking a road that went several miles east of town, then south for about ten miles or so, then cut back towards the freeway again. It was nice to be able to see parts of Wyoming that you don't normally get to see, but the whole time I had this funny kind of feeling like if we get stuck out here somehow, we're going to die because we are miles from anywhere. And it was cold and the wind was blowing pretty hard. While we were out in nowhere land April called and let us know that the freeway was closed all the way to the Colorado border and that right now the only way to get from Wyoming into Colorado was through Laramie, which is another hour west of Cheyenne. Hmm. This may be more of an adventure than we thought. But for the time being we continued towards Cheyenne and followed a frontage road that basically went along side the freeway most of the way. But you may be thinking: "Hey, if they closed the freeway because of adverse weather conditions, wouldn't those same adverse weather conditions exist on a road right next to the freeway? And wouldn't that road probably not get the same plow treatment that the freeway was likely to get, making it even more dangerous to drive on?" And you would be correct on all counts. So we are driving along this side road, through what might be considered blizzard-style wind, and passing through patches where the wind had blown snow onto the road which had piled up sometimes over a foot deep. There were tire tracks through the snow where the previous cars had gone through but it was piled high enough between the wheel tracks that you could hear it scrape the underside of the car. At one point we were following a big red pick-up truck with double tires in the back and we watched as sometimes it was sliding around on the snow. It didn't exactly instill us with confidence. I asked Josh again if he wanted to practice driving but again he said no.

I took this picture on the drive home... It didn't turn out very well because of the angle of the sun, but all we could see beyond the edge of the road was a sea of clouds

Normally it only takes an hour to get from April and Dean's house to Cheyenne but this time it took an hour and a half. But this was an hour and a half of terror, driving in crazy conditions as I've described above. We finally got to Cheyenne alive somehow and we were worried that we might have to take a detour over to Laramie. If we did, we would need to stop for gas since we were running low. The first signs we saw when we got to Cheyenne said that the freeway to Colorado was closed, and oh, by the way, the road to Laramie was also closed. Hmmm. We might have to spend longer in Cheyenne than we hoped. But we kept on driving and it turns out they must have just re-opened the road because we did not have to stop and made it into Colorado where the wind was much less brutal. We made it home safely and just as we were pulling up to the house the gas light came on. I told Mom that she should get gas in the car tomorrow and then we all unloaded the car and went inside and went to bed.