Yes, you heard me right. After more than two weeks since we'd been into town together, we finally got a chance to do some shopping and run other errands in town yesterday. We returned overdue library books; stocked up on food for several weeks (although we still have our emergency stash that could last a month or more); got much needed gasoline for the snow blower and Ranger; got some wine and whiskey; dropped by the hardware store; bought a new project at the yarn store (that you'll hear more about later); got dog and cat food; and I don't remember what else. It was liberating.

Okay, scraping away at the snow with the Ranger and a snow blower just was not going to get the job done. There was just too much snow on the road. So, we hired a snow plow to come and open the road.

Crashing through the snow.

The results are shown in the next series of photos. That's a lot of snow.

Now, to anyone experienced with our weather, you realize that this is a very temporary solution. All the "tunnels" created by plowing will completely fill in (from left to right in these photos), the first time we have any wind. Theoretically, we should be able to now use snow blowers to open them back up since the snow should be all light and cute and fluffy (not the frozen, compacted stuff from before). But, one never knows, and that is a lot of work still.

The big benefit of having the road open is that we can now park the Suburban at the state line and use the Ranger to gain access to it in almost any kind of situation. Sure, if we get 3 feet of snow and the wind is blowing 50 mph, we probably won't want to take the Ranger out for a 45 minute drive to the state line. But, we can always wait a few days, let things settle some and then get out.

So, again in theory only, we can no longer get "snowed in". At least not for more than a few days. (Our neighbors are chuckling at my naiveté.)