An update to follow up this post from last night about how my mother was stuck on her way home in the ice storm that hit Atlanta yesterday.

Mom ended up making it home safely last night. She had to park at the entrance to the neighborhood and walk over a mile to get home. When crossing a driveway, she had to get on her hands and knees and crawl, that’s how slick the tarmac was.

Today, in typical Atlanta style, the weather has changed dramatically, and it’s now up to about 50 degrees all over the city.

The traffic is still backed up from commuter accidents early this morning though. I drove through the city to get to mom’s house today, and what is normally a 45 minute drive took me 2 hours, and probably would have been even longer if I took the highway, rather than surface roads the whole way.

It’s almost surreal, because here it has warmed up, so it just looks like it was hit with rain. Except there are cars parked willy-nilly off the road leading to our neighborhood, and within our neighborhood. It looks like a giant flood came, picked up the cars, and then subsided, leaving them scattered in random places.

I learned how to drive up north, but it’s 100 times worse when we get winter weather down here, because there is no practiced system for sanding and salting roads like there is up north. Plus, even if 90% of the people are driving as slowly and carefully as they can, there’s another 10% who don’t get it, and cause accidents.

I hope everyone made it home eventually last night, and that those injured in accidents got help in time.