The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Hello! This is a first post in my English version of personal blog. Today was definitely terrible day. Sky became an unstoppable source of snow and wind at 2 p.m. and it was snowing until 10 pm. I mean heavy snowing. It still snows, but I prefer to think that not so intensively. Eight hours of snow with strongest wind. I suppose that not less than 10 centimeters of snow came from sky

In this conditions all transportations will become a great problem. This was a very long way from my working place to home. I usually  give a lift for Slava as he lives nearby and we work together. It is usually takes about 5 minutes to rich him. Today we’ve spent more than hour. The final step was the huge traffic jam on the bridge just near the turn I have to make in order to go to Shushary, the suburb of Saint-Petersburg city where Slava lives. It took about 50 minutes to go through this bridge! Wow. It was my first time with such a ‘dead’ traffic jam. Nobody moved for about 20 or even 30 minutes.

I’ve been driving so slow, that had time to make some photos for you. I do not like to use a full-sized photo camera and usually prefer to use my mobile phone with a tiny embedded camera.

It started not so bad as I thought. We saw snow, but there was no traffic jams in the center of the city:

Then situation became more ‘tight’:

and we decided to go around as saw more problems on our way:

“Not so bad”, I thought. We have some car incidents, but can move more than 15 kilometers per hour. However it was 6.45 pm. The time I usually driving somewhere nearby my home place. So, the most important thing for that time was to move from the central street to less occupied:

I’ve found out that it is more snow on street at 7 pm than when we started our little trip at 6 pm:

I was shocked with the speed snow went down to our streets and occupied important place on the road. If we had 4 lines on a road yesterday, it is only 3 of them left today! So, we’ve stopped nearby the circle where two big streets were crossing each other:

It took us about 15 minutes to drive through it. We thought it was our last obstacle that day. How stupid we were. The main ‘thing’ was just in 3 kilometers ahead.

You can see that it became much more darker:

We’ve took the wrong way from the bridge. No move, only these big trucks and no any chance to go further. We’ve waited about 10 minutes without any movement and decided to go back. The problem was that we had no such an opportunity. Legally. This was a one-way road. It didn’t scared me. I just started to understand that can spend about 5 more hours in this jam. I’d better find another one - for 1 or 2 hours :). But first I had a slow and not-easy way with all my lights on and moving about 300 meters backwards. I had no place to turn the car back. So it was not so easy to drive using only rear mirrors as a source of information about road conditions. Remember, there were snowing and quite windy. You could hardly see what happens in 20 meters. I just hoped that there’ll be no guy crazy enough to drive more than 10 km/h at these weather conditions.

Ok, I’ve found a traffic jam of my size:

I suppose you can see the sign in the upper top part of the photo. First, I’ve went right. Now I wanted to try the left :).

Next 25 minutes became a history without any visible changes in our situation. We’ve seen cars moving in opposite direction, but couldn’t change the direction because of the separator and level difference (opposite road was from 3 to 5 meters lower). That the real miracle happend: we’ve started to move and moved for more than 150 meters. The joke was that we’ve stopped just 10 meters before our turn to the right (to Shushary):

You see jeep? It tried to move through the pedestrian’s way. No luck, there was a road sign. It could hardly to move near it. I’ve stayed in the car and Slava decided to check the situation. There were several trucks not moving to the bridge for some reason. I do not know what Slava said to them, but they moved forward and we’ve managed to go right.

This was not the end of story. I’ve tried to go back, but found not so big, but traffic jam. I’d better spend the time as a guest in Slava’s house than a prisoner of traffic in the car. So I’ve returned to Slava’s house and waited a hour. It was not so good as usual when I returned to road, but alright.

It took me four hours from office to home.

All photos I’ve made on road you can see here: http://peter.infosreda.com/gallery/v/25032008/