From 33 Inches to Fargo

Candy: My mom graduated from Minnesota State University-Moorhead today with a B.A. in English/Mass Communications. Oh, and she was summa cum laude, too, the highest honors reserved for those with a 3.80 GPA or better. We're so proud of her.

We drove through the afternoon and throughout the night last night to be here in Fargo-Moorhead for her special day. If you haven't already heard, Denver got hammered with a major upslope blizzard on Wednesday, dropping 33 inches of snow combined with 35 mph winds. Both our Enterprise offices closed early that day, and it took me 2 hours to drive the 4 miles home that afternoon, while it took Tim 4 hours to drive 12 miles. Crazy.

There were hundreds of cars that were stranded and abandoned on Wednesday afternoon and evening. I've never seen anything quite like it. I wasn't sure I was actually going to be able to make it home on Wednesday afternoon, and avoided getting stuck several times before finally succumbing to the drifting in our apartment complex. I had to abandon the Element in the road inside our complex and hike across the parking lot to get out of the storm.

On Thursday, after hearing that both our offices would be closed for the day, we decided to venture out around 11am to assess the damage and to see whether we would, in fact, be able to leave Denver to drive to Fargo. This is what we saw when we rounded the corner of the garages in front of our building.

We don't own a snow shovel, so we took some plastic bowls with us to hopefully help scoop some of the snow away. You can see how much fun Tim was having with that!

Fortunately, two guys from another apartment offered to help shovel away the drift behind the El, and with their help pushing while I drove, we eventually came unstuck. After a quick check of the internet to see whether I-25 was still closed, we decided to venture north and take our chances getting out of Denver.

Fortunately, the roads were open, and except for a bad stretch for about 100 miles north of Cheyenne, Wyoming, we had great roads and ended up driving across the western part of South Dakota & North Dakota before reaching I-94 and heading east to Fargo. We arrived in Fargo around 7am and slept for a couple hours in a mall parking lot before checking in early into our hotel.

The commencement ceremony went pretty quickly, despite the large number of graduates. My younger brother Clint and 2 of his sons also showed up, and then my older brother and his family joined all of us at Clint's house for a reception/supper, after which we gave our nephews their gifts.

I would have had more photos to post from this trip except that in my hurry to pack up and get out of Denver I forgot to make sure I had the battery charger for my camera, so when we arrived in Fargo I realized I had low batteries and no way to use the camera today.

We are heading back to Denver tomorrow afternoon, planning first to spend some more time with my mom and Clint & his family. It'll be nice to have a couple days away from work to spend together, and of course the captive time in the El is always a treat.

Enjoy the holidays. I'll leave you with this photo of Chase in our hotel this morning. He's fast asleep now, having been worn out by 5 little boys under the age of 7.