I told y'all, didn't I? A few days ago in my Pineapple Express that you'd better hope our Las Vegas storm didn't come to where you live. Now some of you are going to find out why. There's lots of energy in that weather system.

In early 1996 I was on a business trip to Baltimore and got stranded in a blizzard as big as this weekend's storm that's snarling things up. You can imagine how exciting this was for the weather people on the local network channels, they had continuous live storm coverage for 24 hours. I was watching that in my hotel room and dining on the cheese and crackers I'd bought ahead of the storm, and then the people I was going to meet with called and invited me to their house to sit out the storm so I braved the roads (12 lanes of I-95 in northern Maryland totally empty but for me) and forged on to their house.

I ended up battling 3 and 4 foot drifts and I was lucky to get out of the hotel room and stay at someone's house for the extra days I had to be there. My flight home was delayed to a couple of days later, but overall, it worked out fairly well. I met some nice people, and it was an unforgettable experience.

They had the neighbors over for dinner and turned out these people had visited my uncle's trading post out in the styx of Colorado, plus they had worked in the same phone company office in New Jersey as my mother's cousin and my in-laws next-door neighbors in Colorado. Don't forget I was in Maryland, so this reminds me of the Kevin Bacon six degrees of separation theory.

When I was ready to go home, I drove my rental car through the still-deep snow back to Dulles Airport. I was supposed to take the Hertz shuttle to the airport and then try to get a shuttle to a nearby hotel for the night. There was a man there from England renting a car and he was asking the counter people for directions how to get to that hotel, so I asked if I could ride along with him. The roads were still piled high with snow, and he appreciated having a navigator. That worked out well for both of us.

I'm a little bit jealous of all those people who get to experience this big storm, as long as they've got power and food and supplies, and a good place to spend the nights. But if I was there I might not be so lucky as I was the first time, so probably just as well I'm not there.

Wishing everyone clear highways ahead.