Winter Driving in Louisville

There are no less than 1.4 million reasons why I love Louisville. They range from the big (Kentucky Derby) to the small (hot browns) and all points in-between. Many of the reasons are a bit absurd to outsiders, like the fact that when anyone in Louisville asks where you went to school they mean high school, not college. For me one of those really weird reasons I love Louisville is the way we spaz out whenever we get winter weather. Today was no exception.

To paint a picture for my readers, Louisville does get cold weather during the winter. This isn’t Florida. Out temps in the winter usually average in the high 30′s with periodic dips into single digits. We get snow, occasionally even getting a real-deal blizzard. We also get ice storms. And tornadoes. And flooding. And a hurricane last year.  And an earthquake. And sweltering heat and humidity. And….  I digress. The point is we should know how to deal with cold weather and to be fair a lot of people here do. They put on warm clothes, put antifreeze in their cars, throw some salt in the trunk, keep the snow shovel handy, etc. But a lot of folks around here don’t really have a clue what to do when winter strikes. If there is a call for 1 inch of snow there will be a run on bread and milk that afternoon. And when the really unexpected occurs, we get a scene like I saw this morning.

Last night we got a bit of snow. It was just a dusting and the stuff that hit the roads immediately turned to water. No big deal. But then around 6am the temps dipped below freezing and that water became something that resembled an ice skating ring. As soon as I pulled out of the driveway I thought, “Going to have to drive careful today,” and that was as bad as I thought it would be. Then I got to the end of my quiet little street and saw two cars that had collided and were waiting for the police (my first gripe of this post – when you get in a fender-bender and nobody is hurt, exchange info and get moving). The I turned and saw another accident. And then I spotted a third at the entrance to my neighborhood. This was insanity! I opted to head out of the neighborhood via the ‘back door’ and then saw 4 cars in various states of distress in people’s yards. After 25 minutes I finally escaped my neighborhood.

My first outside street is a hilly one and I was scared, but had no choice in the matter. I wasn’t scared about my driving, but about what other people were doing. I watched car after car slide off the road or just give up (my next gripe, if you can’t get your car moving and you want to throw in the towel, pull over and walk). I literally passed 4 cars where the driver had stopped in the middle of the road and just decided they had enough for the day. The biggest problem seems to be that the drivers insisted on mashing the gas to gain traction instead of throwing it in L1 and taking it slow.

Needless to say my normal 30-40 minute commute took 2 hours and 40 minutes, most of which was in the 2 miles from my house to the freeway. I got to work 2 hours late and had to burn some vacation time to avoid a short check next week. Craziness. So a week from now I will laugh about this and chalk it up to the wonderful silliness that grips Louisville in the winter. For right now, I’m just a little frazzled and wishing the city would mandate driver’s training for all Louisville residents conducted by folks from Minnesota, New York state and South Dakota. Oh, and mandatory days off for anyone who owns a vehicle with rear-wheel drive only. And a free bag of salt and a tow strap for everyone who pays their taxes.

I’m willing to bet that we handle natural disasters better than a lot of states, having had to deal with a huge variety of them in our lives…so that is our talent. But when it comes to winter driving, the folks in Louisville are still mostly amateurs and it only seems funny in the warm days of summer.