As you may know Specsavers IT Department moved from Eastleigh town centre to Whiteley business park near Fareham. This was great news for me as I live in Fareham (about 2 miles as the crow flies from the new office), thats 3¾ miles by bike or 5 miles by car.
I started out with the best of intentions, cycling to work every day (about 20 minutes), but when the weather started turning cold I wimped out and started driving to work (no car parking fees now).
Anyway, I drove to work yesterday, drove to the post office at lunch time, and then it started snowing…
Come 5 o’clock there was a fair bit of snow on the ground and the traffic on Parkway was queued up. “I’ll wait for the queue to subside”, I thought. About 6pm people were coming back into the office saying that they had hardly moved and the the road out of the estate was closed.
So some of us walked up to have a look. Basically nobody could make it up the hill to the motorway, so I carried on walking across the M27 Junction and walked home along the A27 leaving the car in the office car park. As you can see the Motorway was flowing fine, it was the steep hills on the A roads that were the problem.
M27 Eastbound at J9
The traffic was virtually stationary nose-to-tail all the way along the Eastbound A27 until the traffic lights at the bottom of Titchfield Hill. Guess what, everyone was struggling to go up the hill on the icy road again. Helped push a few cars uphill that couldn’t make it. BMWs were worst being rear-wheel drive.
This is what Highlands Road looked like:
Highlands Road in the Snow
In all it took me 2 hours to walk the 5 miles home in my office trousers and shoes (I had a ski jacket, hat and gloves on though).
Just to give you an idea of how much snow was falling, here are a couple of shots of my back garden:
That's how much snow had fallen by 8:30pm
I didn’t fancy walking 1½ to 2 hours to work today only to find that nobody else had made it in and that the roads were still too slippery for me to drive home, so I took the day off. I also thought better of trying to cycle into work on my mountain bike – I didn’t fancy slipping and sliding all over the road.
