Well it is currently 7:42pm on Friday... I should at this very moment be sitting at a table digesting a very nice meal of salmon, and enjoying desert, and a cup of coffee. I should be doing this at a resteraunt in Maine. I should then shortly be headed out to do a little shopping at L.L.Bean... (they're open 24 hours a day, so time is never an issue there) I say I should be doing this because I am still sitting in my basement in central New Jersey... Now, never let it be said I didn't try to get up there... I picked up my sister at 10am sharp... I walked back in my door tonight at 6:32pm... During those eight and a half hours, we managed to cover 124 miles... According to a web based converter, that's about 200 kilometers incase anyone from the metric world reads this... That averages out at 14.5 miles per hour...
Now, of course, I knew this storm was coming... I've been following it on various weather pages... It wasn't really supposed to go very far north of NJ, so we decided we could tough it out untill we got into the clear... By the time I got 62 miles from my sister's place, we checked the weather, and all of a sudden, they were calling for it to snow all the way up to Maine now... That's when we called it off...
For those of you not from the north east US, let me explain what a nor'easter is... Without going into the ugly technical aspects of it, (which honestly I just don't recall completely anyhow...) its a big nasty storm... It results from a large dip forming in the jet stream, that allows a mass of cold air to come down from Canada, and mix it up with a warm (relitively) moist air mass from the south... Now, these things are not like hurricanes/typhons in that they aren't so concentrated, and don't have the wind speeds associated with them... They do however do as much damage around here simply because they are miserably persistant, and cover larger areas... Think of a storm dumping massive amounts of rain/snow/ice on you for a week... These suckers cover more than a 1000 miles quite often too, so that flooding is a real common result... They keep pounding the shoreline too, day after day, eating away at the beaches, and swamping/destroying beach area construction...
Generally, you can tough out these storms if its rain... They're dangerous due to flooding, but flood areas are pretty predictable here... When they hit with snow, it gets ugly... Sometimes the result in blizzard conditions, though more often it seems they just keep dumping it on hour after hour a little bit at a time... Naturally since they're persistant the totals get up there... They're calling for about a foot all told this time around... Now, I know, that's not a big deal to many folks, but consider this... We're the most densely populated state around... Our traffic in good conditions is nuts... There's also no place to put the damn snow really... It ends up in huge piles in parking lots, and berms along the roads that make the right lane impossible... In general terms, you're just better stocking up on chips, beer, and videos and just waiting one out in your house... Give the road crews a full day after it stops to really dig things out, and then still expect that the roads will be a mess...
Ugh... I didn't stock up on anything since I wasn't supposed to be here... Thankfully my bar is always well stocked, and I have lots of coffee... Its gonna be a long weekend...
Update: Both Tom and Mookie have put in their $.02 in on Nor'easters as well...
Update: Damn... they just issued a blizzard warning for tommorow... snow drifts of 3' - 5'... I can't wait untill spring...
Posted by Backstage at December 5, 2003 06:21 PM