Here's a timeline of what I went through:
4 PM - wife calls to tell me it's snowing and hailing hard in Seattle. Nothing in Redmond yet, but I decide to bail anyways.
4:30 - ST545 bus arrives at Overlake Transit Center and I get on. Hail falling hard.
~5:00 - ST545 bus slows to a stop and can't move any farther forward, going uphill on 51st st towards the freeway (545 usually goes across 40th, but that was blocked by another bus). Bus driver tells us all to get out and meet her on the other side of the hill. She backs up to the bottom of the hill to try again. We disperse.
5:45 - After a long time walking around Overlake looking for a likely way to get home, I end up at the bus stop on the ramp from 40th to the freeway. Three of us decide to walk to the Yarrow Point bus stop, much closer to home and with many more bus routes.
7:45 - We make it to Yarrow point! Our ragged band has expanded to six, all Microsofties.
7:50 - The luckiest moment of a very lucky night. French guy with a van pulls over at the Yarrow Point stop, picks us all up, turns out he lives in my neighborhood (so does one of the other folks I was walking with). He drives me (and another of the walkers who lives near me too) all the way to two blocks away from my house. Another short walk in the snow, and I'm home at 8:15.
Now, some stories and impressions from the walk - not necessarily in order:
Ramp from 40th down to the freeway had a good half inch of fresh, undisturbed snow on it. The only thing that marred it were the tracks of what was clearly a bus that had skidded. This is the main ramp for Microsoft main campus, to see it so pristine and with no traffic on it was incredible.
At 148th, Police were attempting to clear all traffic off 520, I'm not sure why. But nobody could make it up the ramp, so all the traffic was just sitting there in one lane going nowhere. After that, 520 was empty for a half mile, except for a mail truck on the left side trying to get over to the right.
Fresh fallen snow everywhere - crunch crunch of my footsteps in the snow and the sound of one car with snow tires driving over snow brought back a lot of memories from childhood in Rochester NY.
One office building had perfectly clear sidewalks in front of it, and the smell of fresh baked bread. The sign on the building said VoiceBox. If I ever get bored of working at Microsoft, I'm definitely applying there.
Coming down near the top of a steep hill, a lady in a sporty car calls out to us for help. Michael goes over and talks to her - she's in a little car with sporty tires and she's skidding, and can't get out of the skid. Michael tries to help her, but they can't get her moving without skidding. We all call out to her to park the car, it's not worth the risk to try and make it down the hill. She calls back out to us "But I've got a 15-year-old dog in the car!". She parks anyways.
A few times, we pass stopped cars and I want to push but my legs and back are so tired from walking up and down hills I'm afraid I'd hurt myself. I did push one car, with lots of help, right after we got off the bus at the beginning of the evening.
I started realizing just how bad things were, standing at the bus stop at 148th and 51st, and realizing that even if a bus came, traffic was going much slower than I could walk. On the walk down to 40th, every intersection was gridlocked. Later, walking along 24th st, several people called out from their cars to us asking what was going on.
I heard one man talking to another, their cars had clearly just run into each other. He said "You should just park - if you keep driving down this hill you'll just get into another accident like this."
Walking up the last mile or so, from 108th to Yarrow Point, we were on an unlit street in a very peaceful residential neighborhood. Lots of trees covered with snow, felt like we were in the country.
More stories and pictures from another of the walkers at http://mc.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D720347CD7BF8F70!3644.entry. I'm on the left in the picture of us at the bus stop at Yarrow Point.
Here's what was waiting for me on the front porch when I got home:
