Winter driving . Not sure when or where this video was taken but...

[Budi]

Link to tweet

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. According to the Twitter thread it was in Montreal.

[MuseRider]

2. Who has not ever enjoyed

that great experience?

I had one really bad accident on black ice on an overpass where my life flashed before my eyes as the front end of my truck rode up and sideways on the guardrail as I skidded all the way down hanging over the highway. It took the police 45 minutes to get to me as every time they tried to turn onto that road they skidded past. Lovely day!

Those lovely, long skids down the street with everyone. A time of bonding I would say.

[Laffy Kat]

3. Yikes, MuseRide!

That sounds terrifying. Black ice is one of my worst nightmares and it's common here in Colorado because it's so dry. You don't realize it's there until it's too late.

[csziggy]

4. Who hasn't? A native Floridian who has never been where there is that kind of weather

One Christmas, I think it was 1989 (yes, my memory is still good: https://www.weather.gov/ilm/ChristmasSnow1989), my husband and I had gone downstate to spend Christmas with my parents. Christmas Eve there was an ice storm up here in North Florida. We got word that all the pipes and water troughs were frozen solid and the people taking care of the horses didn't know what to do about it, so we drove home on Christmas Day.

By the time we passed Perry we'd seen miles and miles of ice coated trees, something I had never seen in my life. Fortunately by the time we got to Tallahassee, the traffic on the roads had broken up what ice there had been. It caused the asphalt on the roads to heave up, something the road crews around here had never had to deal with before. There was six inches of ice in the water troughs, so we took an axe to break it up, but had to do it several times during that day or it would freeze back up.

The dog had gotten cold even though he had a well insulated dog house, so he pulled the supply tube from the heat pump loose from the house and crawled up inside it. The outside high temperature that day was something like 25 F - it'd gotten down to 8 the night before - and it was 40 degrees inside the house and getting colder - but the dog was toasty and warm. Once we got the horses set up for the night, we found a motel room so we could have a warm bed and hot showers.

The pipes didn't thaw out for several days and it took three days to get someone to get the heat hooked back up. We were glad to have the hotel room for that time - it got down to 30 F inside the house and didn't warm up for a full 24 hours after they got the heat hooked up. That spring we put skirting around our double wide trailer.

That is as close as I ever want to be to the kind of weather that can produce black ice!

[genxlib]

7. I got stuck in that storm too

Was driving up to northwest Florida on I75 when the temperature started plummeting during a drizzle. Of course no one in Florida had the equipment or experience to deal with it.

The trouble started with a few cars off the road at every bridge. Before long, the entire road was a sheet of ice. There were times that I would be sitting dead still and start sliding just due to the slope of road. It took about 6 hours to get the last few miles to Lake City where we got off for a break. A quick conversation with local gas station told us that his tow truck already had hundreds of calls and it was only getting worse further north. We found the very last hotel room that was available and called it a day.

That trip stressed me out so bad I didn’t even continue. The next morning cleared a little bit and I just turned around and went home skipping Christmas all together. That is when I knew Miami had become my adopted home because when the going got tough, that is where I wanted to be. To this day, I love cold weather but want nothing to do with driving in it.

[csziggy]

10. Yeah, that must have been Christmas Eve

We thought about driving home that day but my Dad talked me out of it. He knew what it would turn into.

Dad's family was from Escanaba, Michigan, in the Upper Peninsula and he graduated from Michigan Tech in Lansing on the northern side of the UP. He did two years or so, joined the Navy, married and went back to complete his degree. He'd grown up in Florida, though, where his father was a mining engineer.

Poor Mom had grown up in Alabama, served her first part of the war as a Navy Nurse in Virginia Beach the spent the rest of the war at what became Camp Pendleton and in Hawaii where they met. Then she spent a year and a half in Michigan. She HATED the snow and the cold.

After Dad graduated they moved to Central Florida and Mom never went anywhere it might snow or get very cold - ever. I live fartherest north - if you can consider Tallahassee north.

[hlthe2b]

5. I had my 360 degree experience years ago in Wyoming. Fortunately, I missed a guardrail by inches

and my (then) Jeep Cherokee did not hit anything and was not hit by anyone else. I was then and am now very experienced driving in ice and snow, but there is just not a damned thing you can do on black ice except not make it worse by slamming on brakes--basically steer through it.

A horrible experience that doesn't leave you.

[sarge43]

6. Studded tires are absolutely essential n/t

[irisblue]

8. 10? I counted 10 crashes

[Fla Dem]

9. OMG!!! What a spectacular chain reaction!!!

[jimlup]

11. Everybody has to remember again that the friction drops to zero... /nt