City of Ice

I wish you could see it (and maybe you did on CNN) but I have no camera, so allow me to paint a picture with my words. Like a poet.

Imagine a world, where cars lie abandoned in ditches, where trees sag and branches snap like toothpicks. Imagine a world, where darkness reigns and traffic lights blink, blink, blink. Imagine a world, where planes will not land, and hotels are overflowing with frightened families.

I know it sounds like a fantasy place, but it is real, and it is Oklahoma City. And it is currently covered in 2 inches of ice and more is coming. My adventure starts on a 6:30am flight to Dallas this morning. The first thing I noticed was that there were cots stacked up all over the place. Clearly there had been major delays the night before. CNN says that much of the midwest was hit by an ice storm. My flight got delayed. My flight got canceled. My coworker could not fly directly from Ohare to OKC so he flew to Dallas. We were re-booked on a flight the next day. We said "No thank you" and rented a car to make the drive. 3-4 hours from Dallas to Oklahoma City with potentially dangerous roads. But we needed to get to the client tonight.

As we approached the city the ice started building. The temperature gage slowly dropped, dropped 40 down to 32. 15 miles out, everything was completely covered in ice. Coming into the city, trees were snapped everywhere and cars were on the side of the road. I finally got ahold of the client and they said that power was out this morning, and they had to go to another building. We decided to check in and call it a night.

So that was my day. Up at 4:15am to catch the first flight in order to wait for 5 hours in the Dallas airport. Rent a car in order to drive 4 hours into the city of ice in which we didnt do any work. My baggage is still in Dallas. The weather does not look to improve tomorrow. I may be wearing the same shirt all 3 days. The client paid us over $100 an hour to "work" today. I rented a Volvo from National.

Praise God we made it safely