So the time came for me to take the Mrs's car out to New Mexico and to help her get moved out of her apartment into the room she was renting in one of the suburban neighborhoods.

The only problem was, Mother Nature was just not in the mood to leave me with a nice high and dry road on my way. A major storm blew in with freezing rain pelting my exit route out of Michigan to the west. I went online and got radar images and thought about what the best route would be. My plan was to leave on Wed the 5th and get to Albuquerque by Friday the 7th and then fly home on the 9th. The way this ice looked however, I thought that I might have to lose an additional day.

I finally decided to chance the southern route, hoping that the further I drove south the warmer it would get and the ice would turn to rain. I've done lots of driving in the ice before, and if you take it slow, like really really slow, it's not that bad. It just takes forever and you have to be careful of the nuts who are driving way too fast. I figured I'd trade an extra hundred miles of driving for the chance to get out of the ice sooner rather than later.

Sure enough, I got out of the ice and into the rain about Dayton Ohio where I pulled over at a rest stop and took this photo of the current conditions.

The rain finally stopped late Wed evening and I finally slept somewhere west of Lexington, finally headed due west.

The next day was uneventful, except of course for the wonderful gas stop illustrated in the previous entry. But by nightfall Thursday, I had driven back into the remnants of a rather serious ice storm. In the middle of Oklahoma my hotel parking lot was a sheet of ice and I almost slipped and broke my neck getting into the room.

Breakfast was as Americana as it gets, for from the restaurant next door to my hotel there was a broadcast of some Friday morning farm report, along with the going hog futures from that morning.

Mile after boring mile was finally interrupted with a reminder of just how correct I was taking the southern route, since that band of ice had lashed across the entire midwest and stretched into the Texas panhandle.

Backlight ice is truly beautiful, if not difficult to capture well with a camera....

and it sure can make a mess of your life if you are not careful.

Hopefully it was a slow roll and the driver was able to walk away.

Proof - it's an 18 wheeler.

Check out the ice on the tips of the trees behind the truck.

At any rate - the road remained dry for the balance of my trip and once I entered the clear air of New Mexico I was able to see the remnants of the storm which probably had left a good lashing of snow on the mountains of Santa Fe.

About 40 miles or so east of Albuquerque I pulled over and shot this panorama of the mountains that are just north of Santa Fe.

I believe that the peak that looks like a volcano is Mt. Baldy, seen from the south east side.

The full sized panorama can be viewed here. (Click on the image in the browser after it loads to enlarge to full size)