I am writing this on Tuesday, 3/18. There are no pics.

Here’s a hard-learned lesson from our years of parenting. When going on an adventure, one does not discuss what the adventure is until safely inside the door. Our last day at Jul’s was Sunday. As forecasted, it was rainy. We planned to see the Lego movie. I broke my parenting rule in spades. I told the kids what we were going to do. I give the kids glow-in-the-dark Lego T-shirts to wear on our adventure. We did well on the drive to the movies. But when we got there, they were sold out. There’s nothing like two kids standing in the rain crying to make one feel like a grand parent. We didn’t have a backup plan (another good idea for the good parent.) Working on the fly, we took the kids for ice cream. Jul and Pat were house hunting. Danita called Jul and got the location of a Red Box. We stopped at the Red Box and got “Monster University”. Then we watched the movie at home. Monster University is a good movie. The kids were totally absorbed. But of course, nothing could match the promise broken.

We had a non-refundable hotel reservation a couple of hours up the road. The forecast was for the precip to continue, changing to ice and snow in the evening. So we had dinner a little on the early side and blew out to the hotel. It was a tense ride, with one eye on the car’s thermometer and one on the time left to reach our destination. As it turned out, the precip had just started to turn when we arrived.

When we woke up in the morning, the world was covered with ice. The hotel was OK; the free breakfast was edible; the internet service was abysmal. By mid-morning, crews had cleared the ice and accidents from the major roads. The forecast called for more wintery stuff on-and-off until 2. After 15 minutes of chipping ice of the car windows,we took off to see how much closer to home we could get. The first part of the ride was miserable driving. The roads were OK, but the windshield wipers and washers were frozen. Stuff was kicked up off the road. We stopped for lunch near Staunton. I found clean snow to wash the windshield. Cabin and engine heat was able to melt a lot of the ice on the car while we ate lunch. When we came out, a few minutes with a window scraper had everything freed up. The rest of the drive was without incident. We got home about 5:30. Our area had a good 6″ of snow. Fortunately, streets and sidewalks in our neighborhood were completely cleared by the time we got home.

So much for my “rule” that it doesn’t snow after the Ides of March.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.