My daughter Anne moved to Atlanta three and a half years ago while her husband attended chiropractic school.  (From which he will graduate with his doctorate this year!!)

The weather, in contrast to their native Michigan, is wonderful there.  Most of the time.  The last few days have been the exception.  We've had a lot of snow here in Ann Arbor this year.  But then again, a lot of snow is not all that uncommon for us.

Liz, who is in high school, has had 7 snow days already.  That is quite a few, even for here.

We scarcely have enough room to put the snow when we shovel because it just keeps coming.  But in Michigan  we know this can happen and we're prepared.  (Otherwise the state would be uninhabitable in the winter. :-)  After a bad snowstorm it's about 12 hours, often less, before the streets are just fine.  Even my own residential street is usually plowed within 24 hours.  And when a lot of snow is predicted our salt trucks are out sometimes before the snow even begins to fall.  They know what they are about.

Not so in Atlanta where my daughter Anne lives.  She left work Tuesday afternoon and just got home a few hours ago, some 36 hours after she had left.   There were some thousand accidents all over the freeways.  Nearly all the major streets were closed because of accidents.  The cars already out were gridlocked.  The salt trucks had not been out early and when the roads were bad they could not get down them because it was like a parking lot.  All snow and ice.  Even my daughter and son-in-law, very experienced snowy weather drivers, both got stuck on the ice.  My daughter had been on a hill and she had the momentum to make it up if someone in front of her had not stopped.  Then she could only spin her wheels.  A friend about a mile away came and picked her up and she spent the night with them.

As Anne ventured out today to make her way home she started to count the number of stranded cars on the highway.  She stopped when she got to two hundred.  Reports were that about a million cars were stranded in Atlanta.  In short, it was a disaster!!  A very dangerous situation for many, many people.

So...I've concluded that in bad winter weather it's much safer to live in Michigan.  Yes, we get a lot more bad weather.  But we are never in a situation where it can't be handled.  Yesterday as I drove my younger daughter Mary to the University of Michigan we saw a tiny plow clearing the walkway/bike path along Washtenaw Avenue, a major thoroughfare.  Nice, I thought.  This is why we can live here.

And God bless those road crews who are out there, day and night, in frigid temperatures clearing our way so we can travel safely.  May the Lord always keep them safe as they do the work that ensures that we are.