The craziest driving day of Ed's life

the National Guard had been deployed in some areas to come out and try to get the kids away from the schools so I've told stories about some of the fastest driving days I've ever had some of the best driving most enjoyable driving days and even some of the ones that had the worst outcomes but the craziest day of driving that I've ever experienced and one that I honestly can't imagine we'll ever be topped was on January 28 2014 which is a day that's come to be known as the ice pocalypse here in Atlanta also called Snowmageddon and it's been farcical a depicted on Saturday Night Live with Buford Callaway who ridiculously named in fact after the city that I grew up in about 45 minutes northeast of Atlanta about how crazy it was to be here driving in a car that day and it's worth noting that whereas in most of the world some weather will limit when you can use a cool car in Atlanta we don't really have that as a problem I mean you can pretty much drive whatever you've got year-round and I tend to do that myself in fact whenever there's a forecast for bad weather most people honestly just ignore it and go about their days because a bad snow day here in Atlanta is a couple of inches in most days even in the deepest of winter it'll still get over 40 or even 50 degrees during most of the you know warmest parts of the day so whatever is there it's just gonna melt the next day now if there is snow on the ground the city goes crazy it is utter pandemonium all schools will be closed for days on end and we just have no preparation there's no like salt trucks or snow scrapers or anything like that and beyond that nobody has winter tires nobody knows how to drive if their car starts to slide so it is just a dumpster fire of the driving experience if that ever happens but fortunately it really doesn't I mean I'd say I've only only remember maybe 10 to 15 days my entire life where the roads were really like impassable in Atlanta but one of those was this day and it kind of started out like any other possible snow day in fact at that time I was working at Lamborghini Atlanta we saw the forecast was supposed to get bad but what ended up happening kind of a unique circumstance where we had some like freezing rain that been thawed but then very quickly the temperature dropped and this was kind of just after noon so the snow really started to come down and at the time my wife was teaching elementary school literally just across the street from the dealership of course her schedule was very different so we rarely commuted together but she was there and they were talking about how they were gonna start getting people out and shutting down the schools as early as they could that day because despite the warnings of snow where in many cases they would have just canceled school preemptively they had all the kids come in and so now they were kind of faced with are we gonna be able to get him home in the normal way and with bus schedules and everything it was getting kind of complicated and so we at the dealership kind of made the decision after nothing was really happening that we were gonna close down and that people could start going home whenever they wanted to and I must have had the Mercedes CL 55 there which was certainly on summer high-performance tires not the thing you'd want to drive in inclement weather with and Nick of motorcycle crashed into Panamera and crawling out of his face fame was there as well with his Corvette so he was in no shape to drive it home and he was only a little bit further along the same route from me so I said alright well you come with me we'll go across the street get Megan's Range Rover we'll all make it home and so he and I went over there and so it kind of waited about an hour for them to get the kids all situated to wear it over central area and then they released as many of the teachers to go on home as they could and so at that point we set out and this must have been probably about 2:00 p.m. when we left Sandy Springs and my normal round home would just be to go up 400 in the cross and be about 12 miles to get to my house and it would normally take out on 2530 minutes maybe 45 and really bad Atlanta traffic which is certainly a risk but as soon as we pulled out of the parking lot it's utter gridlock and that's because a little ways down the road there's a strong up hill and at every uphill as the roads had started to freeze there were literally just pile ups of cars that had attempted to go up totally lost it and come back down and this is what we were hearing on the radio was happening everywhere cars were running out of gas cars were crashing cars were sliding in which way and it was all just a total mess and it literally I think took us an hour and a half to go the one mile to get to Georgia 400 which again involved a couple more uphill stretches which the land rover didn't have any trouble with but every other car was just really really struggling and so we got onto the highway and it was just a total mess everybody's crashed on the side run out of gas spinning a tractor trailers laying on their sides it was literally an apocalyptic situation so very aptly named this ice pocalypse day and so we just kind of continued along there is general movement but you're having to weave in and out as people can get around and then everybody's kind of staging is the next person tries to go up whatever the next hill is and unfortunately because the way that highways set up there's not much of like a real shoulder that would be like unpaved because that would have been perfect for us cuz we could have kind of gone off on the shoulder driven in the snowy grass which the car would not have struggled with it all but we're just continuing along and we had actually brought with us another one of my wife's co-workers also a teacher that was going just a little bit further than Nick so all four of us were in the car just kind of making the best of it hearing all the news reports of the crazy crashes and fires and everything else and literally watching people in work clothes with no coats walking along the side of the highway and we picked up a couple of them on our way up to the exit where we would get off of 400 to get him further along the way as they were going to get gas cans or whatever else and we were hearing on the news like people who had been on the road at that point for six seven eight hours and it probably took us five hours I would guess to get up Georgia 400 amazingly my wife's car had enough gas in it to make it which is a very very infrequent occurrence whenever I get into it now but regardless we were able to do that and so we got up to the exit and there was a Waffle House a little ways just off the exit to the right now we were in gridlock traffic up this hill I said you guys just walk up to the Waffle House get some dinner get me something to go by the time I get up there you'll have already eaten hot back in the car you'll be warm we'll be good to go now it's worth saying this was at a very very crazy time in my life so January 2014 this was just a few months after the New York to LA record I was still kind of in the media whirlwind interviews and things like that just having a whole lot of fun with that it was also maybe a month after I had been in the aventador crash while working at Lamborghini Atlanta and so that was all just a little bit too fresh in fact so we had just found out that we were pregnant with our first child on New Year's Day of 2014 so my wife is seven eight weeks pregnant at this point we had just found out and so the prospect of being stuck in a frozen car was perhaps a little higher stakes than usual but they did that they got us some food and came back to the car and we're just kind of crawling along and there's a big hill right off of our exit and it was just littered with cars all over the place and literally it was impassable not because we couldn't get through it just because the whole road was blocked with crashed cars and you know people walking every which way and so we ended up going down another road and through a big church parking lot that had some gates open I had heard that they had had to build a bridge to a different exit and I thought we might be able to make it so we went through there so we slid around a little bit winner making it into and then through this parking lot but of course the exit had some arms blocking it and so we ended up dropping the suspension on her hand Rover down and Nick got out to hold them both up so that I could drive under it we made it it got back on the same road and we were moving along and then somehow they had found some snowplow thing and they were running it along the road that I needed to pass and so the road that we needed to go the only way to get home was closed but this set that must have been 10:30 11 o'clock and we actually came across some this woman and his daughter that were in workout clothes that had decided that since it was going to be a snow day they were just gonna go to the gym and so they hopped in so I think we had six seven people in the car at this point and we're just trying to get back to our house so I could drop my wife and then I was gonna take Nick home and the other girl from her school and these girls that just needed to get a little ways back but that they never got done scraping this road so we ended up going around where they had kind of put up some barrels to block it and drove through the median because the road at that point was really really icy and we got up a couple hills and made it around through some crazy intersections obviously all the traffic lights are out and at this point there were very few people still driving on the roads but it was still very hard to get around because there were literally crowd cars everywhere and we're still hearing of people being stuck on literally every Highway if you looked at a traffic map of Atlanta every single Road was red it was as though I just based on when people were at work and the fact they totally ignored all the warning signs literally we were all on the highway fortunately up towards the suburbs it wasn't that big of a deal in terms of getting to where we needed to go is just steep inclines that nobody else had really tried to do so the car made it great again the Land Rover proving itself to be the best 4x4 by far I got the other girl home I took Nick home we end up going to the Waffle House it was the only thing open to eat again at this point it was probably one two in the morning and I made it home literally just about 12 hours after I had left Lamborghini Atlanta and that was actually a short commute that day you heard of people being stuck in their cars for you know 15 18 24 hours before they were able to get help the National Guard had been deployed in some areas to come out and try to get the kids away from the schools because the school buses couldn't make it and in fact there were at least 20 or so kids that had to spend the night at my wife's elementary school so the next day we went out and we took some water and some food to people as we saw them still parked on the side of the road we filled up some gas cans and found some other friends that were still stuck in their cars and got them to their homes and we went on to her school and there were still about a dozen kids there after everything they've been able to try to do and so I took that last dozen or so home in several trips got them back to their houses or apartments or whatever and and where their families were obviously freaking out but everybody had kind of been I guess banding together to make the best of two inches of snow that had fallen on the roads and we were the laughingstock of pretty much the entire world that next week because of just what insanity had happened I ended up going back to the dealership and forwarding all the calls to my cell phones because I was the one that could get in there and so we just worked from home the next couple of days sold a few cars and ended up you know just coming away with the stories to tell about it for the next must have been two years if you looked at anything that was cheap on Craigslist Atlanta it was some car that had a salvage title because all sides of it were lightly damaged in a low-speed sliding collision I found an s63 that I almost bought that literally it was an all-over repaint because of ice pocalypse that's what he says like that's what happened so it had a branded Thai help but it was really cheap but and I didn't end up buying it but it was probably a good deal I mean you saw all these crazy cars I mean brand-new Audi 's and AMG cars and BMW M cars just parked on the side of the road and people that just walked home some people walked 10 15 20 miles to get back to their houses literally probably in whatever shoes and clothes they wore to work cuz again nobody prepares for this stuff but of course this was again just proof of Doug Cabot's thesis that the way you have a good car story is you just say yes and go try something crazy and so it was a you know fortunately not a scary thing for us because we knew we had enough gas and the car was gonna work and we were gonna get through whatever we had to but it could have gone a whole lot worse but it was a whole lot of fun the next day to play Superman and just go rescue as many as we could [Music] you you

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 524,309

Rating: 4.9376531 out of 5

Keywords: Ed Bolian, VINwiki, Car Stories, Range Rover, wife, teacher, icepocalypse, snl, snowmageddon, snow, sleet, traffic, crashes, accidents, damage, bad drivers, commute

Id: VVSQEaSW6gU

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 28 2019