January 1st, 1999, The Mad Dash in front of the storm
Not many photo's of today. We started out by visiting Memphis Tennessee, and shot into Arkansas (just to say we had been there).
Here are a couple of photos from the Memphis area. One is from the bridge entering Tennessee from Arkansas, the other a strange building located right next to that bridge as you enter Memphis. Don't know what is was, but it sure was strange.
As we started to travel back across Tennessee toward Kentucky there were many vehicles that were passing us coated with ice. We soon learned that there was an ice storm in NE Arkansas. Here is one of the cars. You can see the amount of ice on the antenna.
We managed to keep ahead of the storm as we traveled across Tennessee and most of Kentucky, but it did start to snow as we approached the corner of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana. When we reached Ohio we turned back NW and our plan was to go a bit then stay somewhere in Indiana for the night. We soon were getting very heavy snow and the reports that we were getting on the radio sounded even worse. It doesn't show as bad as it really was in this photo, but you can see some of it.
We ended up driving through the storm and made it past Chicago before it closed down the city. We figured that if we could make it past there we would be on the other side of the storm. We finally ended up stopping at about 4am at a truck stop about 50 miles past and got a few hours sleep. When we woke we heard that Chicago had been closed down with nearly 20" of snow (when we had passed through there was 12 or less).
