Snow Storm

Driving conditions on Highway 26 on January 3, 2022 - KATU photo

We had a snow storm last week, seven inches of snow one day, enough that it hung around for several days. A week ago a friend of my daughter had a baby at St. Vincent Hospital in Beaverton. My daughter wanted to go visit mother and baby at the hospital, but not having a lot of experience driving in snow she asked me to drive. Since I have giant (relatively speaking) four wheel drive pick-em-up truck I said sure, let's go. It was a bit of an adventure.

It was basically a straight shot, ten miles down highway 26. The road was snow packed and there wasn't much traffic. There was no clear pavement. I have never seen it like that before. In addition, the wind was howling, so we are barreling down the road at 40 to 50 MPH and the wind is pushing us around and we drifting around on the road, maybe a foot either side of my intended path. I haven't had so much fun in a long time.

IAman was over on the east side when the storm hit. He checked Google maps before he tried driving over to the west side and all the routes were red so he was expecting a big traffic jam. However, when he got to the highway there was virtually no traffic. The cars that were there were crawling along 15-20 MPH. We suspect Google 'saw' how fast the traffic was moving and decided there was a traffic jam.

P. S. The picture isn't from where we were, but it looked just like that.