I Survived The I95 Gridlock For 16 Hours By Rachel Lauren for Natural Blaze
By now, I’m sure you heard that the gridlock earlier this week on I95 in Virginia was absolutely terrible. And I can attest to the fact it felt worse than it looked on the news. Over 40 miles of cars trapped on the interstate in sub-freezing temperatures for over 20 hours is absolutely miserable. After all, I was trapped there for 16 hours.
Here is my story of how I survived I95.
My boyfriend and I had gone to New England to visit his family for New Year’s and were traveling back home to North Carolina this past Monday. Prior to the backup, the trip had been going great. We had our coffee, had picked up some breakfast, and were on the road by 8am on Monday.
We drove through Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland with absolutely no problem. It was a breeze. There’s a game we play in the car. The two of us take turns picking a color with whoever finds the most of that color having to pay for dinner. We were playing “our game” and having an absolute blast.
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Up until the parking lot known as I95, it was probably the most fun we had ever had on one of these trips, and we’ve made this particular journey together eight times now. We always take I95 because it both has the prettiest views, and is a significantly shorter route. Things were “normal”.
And then we hit DC.
It was right outside of the city limits that our GPS told us there was heavy traffic ahead, but that a shorter route was available.
Normally, it probably would’ve added an extra half-hour, but with the delays on the freeway, it was going to save us about two hours. So we obviously decided to take the detour.
That’s when things went south.
It was getting dark, but we had always pushed through the 13-hour drive in one day so we thought nothing about it. You could tell that it had somewhat snowed recently, but we didn’t think we were going to run into any of the true stormy weather.
And we were right.
We didn’t run into the actual storm, just the aftermath.
The detour took us down some back roads around Springfield, Virginia. It was stressful at first – the roads were something of a mess – and we thought of stopping, but then the roads cleared up, so we agreed that it was fine to keep driving.
