I just got back from Utah from my yearly pilgrimage to the motherland of Colorado. My trip was full of beautiful blue skies, wonderful times with family, Christmas presents, and lots and lots of driving.

The drive to Utah is usually a 7 hour ordeal. Hop on highway 6 right out of Springville down to I-70 and straight over to Denver. My brother and I left on our journey Saturday afternoon expecting no delays. The weather looked good and it looked like a clear shot over.

About an hour and a half into the trip I got a call from my hometown friend John who now lives in Montana. John was flying to Denver and had a layover in Salt Lake City. He explained that during his layover, Delta had canceled the remaining leg of his trip and that he was now stranded. Delta could not even get him on a flight to Denver until Thursday. Yes, that's right - Thursday (that's today). That would be 6 days in the airport. They would not comp him a hotel room, and they would not even refund his ticket fully. He ended up with a partial refund and a cheery "screw you" from Delta.

Conveniently enough, we had made a late start to Denver, and that's where John needed to go too, so I offered to pick him up - there's no way I'm going to leave a brotha stranded in Salt Lake City for 6 days. Being 1.5 hours into our trip, it was double that to get back to where we started - 3 hours to go back to the same place. another hour up to SLC Airport and and hour back would be 5 hours, and then another 1.5 hours back to where we were when John called was a total of 6.5 hours. This effectively doubled the trip.

Fortunately for me, I was able to call in a favor to McSteve who was kind enough to run up to the airport and grab John while I headed back to Provo. This saved a couple hours and saved my mood. I owe you one, McSteve.

We decided to leave the next day in the morning and made it over in time for Christmas Eve. John was so thankful that he paid for all the gas on the way over and even a few snacks. Rock on.

This is the part where I talked about Christmas, the snow storm in Denver, what I did, etc. I'm just going to skip it and talk about the drive home.

Dan and I got up at about noon to drive home today. While heading up I-70 out of Denver we saw a sign that said "I-70 closed at Georgetown." This was sad news as I was eager to get home today. We kept driving hoping something would clear up by the time we made it to Georgetown.

It didn't.

Several miles from Georgetown I-70 became a parking lot. We sat in it for a while an ultimately took an on-ramp (Yes, an on-ramp) to the frontage road. This got us all the way into Georgetown without many problems, but it was a madhouse. Wrecked cars everywhere, people filled up all the gas stations and restaurants while they were waiting out the storm.

We hung out a bit, grabbed some Subway and talked to some other stranded travelers. The visitors center there had televisions showing different areas of the highway in real time, and I-70 beyond where we were was covered in about a foot of snow. The fire marshall told everyone to head back to Denver.

I wasn't about to head back. I would stay in Georgetown all day long and sleep in my car all night if I had to. I already had to drive back to Provo at the beginning of this trip - no more backtracking.

We headed back down I-70 a ways until we found a road that went up into the mountains (highway 40). It was really snowy, but traffic was at least moving. We spent the next 3 hours driving up highway 40 and eventually rallying it on some dirt road for about an hour until we finally came back to I-70 on the other side of the storm. My car pwn3d the mountain. Success!

Since all the other cars were still sitting on the other side of the mountains, I-70 and highway 6 were completely void of cars. The roads were dry and it was smooth sailing the rest of the way home. I now sit safely in my bed, while hundreds of travelers lay freezing in their cars on I-70. Last I checked the pass was still closed.

Suckers.

Here is a final map of our route. View it full size (click on it) to see how awesome it was.