Monday

Yesterday we returned to Kentucky and the farm where Sunshine did much of her growing up. This was a rather more harrowing six-and-a-half hour version of the normally five-and-a-half hour drive. On Saturday night I'd gone to bed earlier than I'm used to because we wanted to get away earlier than normal on Sunday. But I was still woken earlier than I'd planned by the news that it was snowing in Beckley and across the national forest where Sunshine's family lives. So I got out of bed and hurried faster than I wanted, and forty-five minutes later we were on the road. We did not hit snow until just after we crossed the North Carolina border with Virginia, after which we were snowed on more than we weren't for the remainder of the drive. Our one stop at a West Virginia rest area was roiling with windy snow. It blew into the car at every tollbooth down the turnpike. The whole high mountain pass just south of Charleston was covered in a puffy white blanket. The going along the curvy mountain highway was carefully handled but rarely treacherous. There were instances of snowy roads, sure, but it was so far below freezing outside that the flakes rarely packed together. Most snow parted before the traffic in frigid swirls. At worst, visibility was reduced to just a few short car lengths, and the churning road-snow was matched by the pressing air-snow into one single, turbulent environment like inside a rolling snow-globe. It was times like these that the driving was tricky, never because of any accumulating slickness. I did see something I've never seen before: at times during the drive, the clouds would part for a moment and a shocking, apocalyptic sun would burn orange through the continuing flurry. [Cavin]