Winter Break

My father and I were on our way to pick up my sister in Seattle. She had just gotten there after driving through the Cascade Mountain Range through a blizzard on her trip back from college. Now it was our turn. My dad was originally planning to go alone, but after sitting in the house through three snow days and never going outside once I decided I needed to get out. So I said bye to my mom and got in the car with my dad. The snow was coming down so hard that all you could see infront of you was whiteness. My dad's car is a sports car, riding low to the ground, and as soon as he pulled out of the garage and onto the driveway you could hear the sound of all the ice scraping across the bottom of his car. I remember the pain on his face as he remarked, "This is gonna be a long day..." Driving out of our neighborhood the car slid in every direction, bouncing around without control. My wanting to get out of the house was quickly withering away as my stomach leaped around inside my ribcage with every bump. We finally made it to the freeway where the road was now a vast carpet of snow among which cars drove wherever they wanted. No longer were there lanes, or shoulders, there was just a carpet. A carpet with a herd of cars moving along it. My dad's winshield wipers repeatedly froze over to the point that they couldn't wipe the snow off anymore and our windshield was coated in a layer of ice. Everything looked all bent out of shape, all weird. You couldn't make anything out because the ice was morphing it all. At one point my dad had to ask me to look out my window and tell him when to turn. For more than an hour and a half we drove down the middle of the freeway at a top speed of 40 miles per hour until we finally made it to the Westfield Mall, where we were to pick my sister up. We had made it. We had gotten there without crashing. In celebration we walked into the Cheesecake Factory by the mall, asked for a seat, and each bought a ten dollar piece of cheesecake as my dad said, "Enjoy it, we might not make it home." We all had a good laugh as smiles spread across our faces, but they quickly left, for we knew that there was a good amount of truth in his statement.