We called it our annual “family snow day”. The idea was inspired by something my friends and I used to do when we were younger (and gas cost less than a dollar a gallon). We would watch eagerly as the forecasters called for snowfall in our area, only to have the mountains suck out all the moisture and deny us of any snow at all. This happened over and over until one day we got the bright idea that we would simply go to the snow. This sounded great, after all, how nice it is to leave home on a Friday afternoon and be in a hotel deep in the mountains by late evening with three to four feet of snow outside on the ground. Play all day on Saturday in the snow, then drive Saturday night with clear road conditions back home. You still had a day to recoup and then back to work, awesome right? My thoughts where, wouldn’t this same plan work with my family?
Sure it would. Times had changed though, back then we’d just get in the car, and then come up with a plan. No way, not today. I had to come up with a decent plan of action before we even left the house this time. So I researched what parts of the U.S. had the most snowfall on average that was within a one day journey by car. There were two places that I found, the first was Elkins, West Virginia - which I had done when I was younger with my friends and found as much as 4 feet of snow back then!- the second place was Jamestown, New York (which is about 60 miles south of Buffalo) and was claiming to have 3 feet of snow on the ground now with more on the way! With all the lake effect snow pouring down at Jamestown, NY I new this was our destination.
The plan was to make it a three-day weekend since we had about 9 hours each way of drive time. We left home at 4am on Saturday to arrive at a hotel around 1pm that afternoon. The temperature was about 45 degrees as we left our house in Virginia, in the early hours of the morning, still much warmer than average for late January. About 6 hours later we stopped for fuel in Pennsylvania and “man alive!!” was it ever cold. We past a bank sign a few miles later and I believe it read 16! I know some of you may think that’s not quite ‘arctic cold’ but for it being in the mid-40’s earlier that day, we noticed.
As we drove closer to Lake Erie a snow storm developed out of nowhere, then the wind picked up, before we knew it we where in white-out conditions and a full blown blizzard was on us! Then, just as quickly as it came on, it lightened up and started to clear. That only lasted about 10 miles, but traffic had slowed to a crawl and it was quite exciting. We actually decided to stay at a hotel right on the shore of Lake Erie (20 miles west of Jamestown). The lake was froze over as far as the eye could see, which made for a pretty cool view out of a second story window. There were people out on the ice in little huts, it took me a minute to figure out that they were ice fishing. “How cool is that!”, I told my kids. We had never seen anyone doing this before except on TV.
Once at the hotel room, we decided that we wouldn’t waste a single minute. We through our stuff in the room and jumped right back in the car. Now… where to? Well we as close as we had ever been to Niagara Falls, so that was it, to the FALLS!
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