I didn't go home on weekends very much while I was in college. This very much irritated my Mom, who thought I was going to come home every single weekend because she thought I was going to miss it so much. But I knew I was going to have to go home for Thanksgiving in 1982.
Wednesday morning, the day I was supposed to leave, it started snowing. REALLY snowing. However, I never recalled seeing it snow in November before. We were lucky if we got any snow on Christmas. Prior to my first class at 9am, I was walking through the Music building. There were a few students in the lobby. One of them, whom I knew from the Theatre, said out loud, "This is ridiculous! Whoever heard of a White Thanksgiving?"
I was hoping it would stop snowing by 3pm, when I would be finished with my acting class. I had planned to start the 2 1/2 hour drive home around 4pm. However, Mom called up all in a panic about me driving in the snow. She had taken measures to make sure I wouldn't drive home, so she got a hold of one of my Artesia classmates at ENMU to drive me. She said he was going to leave about 1pm. I told her I had class at 2pm, but I would go ahead and skip it. Later she called me and said she found out that classes had been canceled for the rest of the day. I had no more excuses. I was going to have to let him drive me.
I didn't have a problem with someone else driving me home. The problem I had was that I would be home for four days and I wouldn't have my own car to drive around. I mean, I could borrow a car from my parents, but it just wasn't the same.
There were two other people from Lake Arthur going with us. We didn't leave until 2pm. It wasn't snowing at that time, but it was raining, which was probably even worse, considering there was still snow on the ground and roads. We didn't go any faster than 30 miles an hour all the way to Roswell. We were driving with the windshield wipers on the whole way. It's a two-lane highway on the drive to Roswell from Portales. Cars approaching us typically splashed muddy water on our windshield. It would be immediately removed by the wipers. However, a truck drove past us at one point. When the wipers went over the splash, the window was still covered. We all quickly panicked. Fortunately, all the water was removed on the next wipe. We collectively breathed a sigh of relief.
It took about four hours to get to Roswell. We stopped and ate at Long John Silver's. I ordered the "Treasure Chest," which was a combination of fish, chicken and fries. I thought the chicken would be Chicken Planks, but they were the wing pieces that look like little drumsticks. They called them "Peg Legs." It wasn't what I expected because I wanted something that didn't have any bones in it.
The roads had cleared up somewhat for the rest of the way home, but we still had to drive about 45mph, and we had to go through Lake Arthur first to drop the other two guys off. My friend dropped me off at home after 7pm, more than five hours after we'd left.
But the snow continued to have an impact on the long weekend. I'll have Part 2 on Monday.
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