mulegolf Temps have been nice for the past few days here but it's been foggy as all get out. it's supposed to be 39° today and 48°
tomorrow. No complaint there but on Sunday it's supposed to be 21° by 10 am then fall to 13 the rest of the day. It's supposed to snow Sunday too. Monday is going to be about 16°. That's going to feel cold after this past week.
Well, my wife and I met our daughter, her husband and her 2 kids in Mankato, MN. for a belated Christmas dinner. We met in Mankato because it's about half way between our house and our daughter's in Minneapolis. We had a nice lunch and my wife wanted to see a Kiwanis light display in a Mankato Park so we elected to get a motel room at a Radisson for
Sunday night after the light show which was great. The weather people had been talking about a roughly 2"snowfall that
was supposed to come Saturday night and early Sunday. It was supposed to get windy too. I don't know how much snow they got but it was double or more than what was forecasted. They were right about the wind. It blew all night and Sunday morning, gusting to at least 45 mph. It tossed that snow in the air so much that it created whiteout conditions.
The Minnesota State Patrol recorded over 300 vehicles in the ditch on state roads as well as many accidents. We had planned to go home Sunday morning and did start out toward home. Driving wasn't fun as visibility varied from pretty good to not seeing beyond the hood of our car when wind gusts peaked. The farther west we got the worse it was
because the wind was blowing harder as we moved west. We got into a town named Windom and we still had 43 miles to get home. Where we had been on a 4 lane road with a decent amount of traffic, the last 43 miles was to be on 2 lane roads with little traffic. With less traffic, the road tracks the we had been following to stay on the road were no longer there. We drove only about 1/2 mile out of town and decided we didn't want to spend the cold night in the car if/when we got stuck so we turned around and went back into Windom. We got a motel room, one of the last ones left in the only motel in town, an AmericInn. We got up Monday morning and headed home at about 10 am. The winds had dropped to about 30 mph and there wasn't a lot of snow at Windom (the expected 2") so it was mostly drifted in tightly.
Visibility varied from fair to basically normal winter driving conditions. When we arrived home I had to fire up the John Deere lawn tractor with the snow blower on it before we could get the car into the garage. It was a longer weekend than we planned. In the motel we stayed in at Windom, we talked to other people who got stranded there. I met a woman
who said she and her husband had just arrived Saturday from Oklahoma. At that time the temperature was 3° above
zero and the wind chill was -23°. I asked her, "What the hell possessed you to come to Minnesota this time of the year?"
She told me her husband was an over the road trucker who had just gotten a job with a trucking company in Windom.
I said, "Welcome to Minnesota. You'll love the weather here in the Spring, Summer and Fall, but winter is difficult, especially for people who were from the southern states."
