Moving on to....

Christmas!

We made the trek to the cabin again. We left our house December 23rd for the mountains. The roads were pretty good until we hit Showlow. From Showlow to Springerville we traveled about 20 miles per hour on iced-over scary roads. I was driving and we were towing a trailer. It was a bit nerve wracking.

We got into Alpine at about 10pm and headed down the lane to our cabin. We got about 1/8 mile away and up ahead on the road were 2 trucks stuck in the snow right in the middle of the road and there was no way around them!

I thought about making the small hike to the cabin without the car but all of our belongings and overnight bags were in the back of the trailer all covered up. I thought about hiking without our things for the night but the kids had shorts on and I had slip-on shoes. All of our snow boots and gear were in the cabin.

We decided to turn around and got stuck in the snow trying to. One of the neighbors kindly came out to help us in 7 degree weather with the wind blowing something awful.

Driving back into the town of Alpine we realized that all the hotel parking lots were snowed-in and we couldn't even get in. We had no place to park. We did manage to find a hotel that would take us and with a good running start we got the car through the snowed-in parking lot.

The next morning our good friends and rescuers, Dan Nicolds and Dan Adair, came to give us some chains for the tires. I forgot to mention that we spent at least an hour in Showlow trying to find chains for our tires. Every place we checked was sold out! Dan and Dan even tracked down the snow plower guy and asked him to clear the road to the cabin. We made it!