Boxing Day Blizzard Part III: NJ declares state of emergency, I spend a night at the Marriott

Did you miss the first parts of my series? 
Boxing Day Blizzard Park I: An early-morning accident 
Boxing Day Blizzard Part II: I did not make it home through the storm


In the previous stories: My blizzard saga beings with a fender bender on the way to work at the Asbury Park Press. The snowstorm starts and I find myself unable to get home. I book a room at a nearby hotel after getting stuck twice on the way there. In Part III: I make a trip through the blizzard to Walgreens to get some supplies. I spend a night at the Marriott with some editors from the newspaper who have also been stranded. 

My room at the Marriott... I could get used to this! 

I walked into the hotel room, dropping my belongings in random places along my floor haphazardly. 

Before leaving my car, I'd rummaged through it and found 2 pairs of sweat pants and a sweatshirt. I threw these on the bed.

I took stock of my new place.

I liked it. In fact, I wanted to live here.

The room was a studio-style apartment, with a kitchen AND appliances. A large screened TV faced the bed and I got busy flicking on every light in the joint and cranking the thermostat to the max temp of 85.

My stomach was rumbling so I called down to the desk and the operator picked up. "Hey do you guys have a cafe in here or anything?"

"We serve breakfast in the morning," she answered politely.

"What time?"

"We serve it at 6:30," she said.

"Well I leave at 5:30 a.m. so I'll miss it," I told her. The line was silent. "Are there any places that would deliver food here you think?" I ask.

All I can think about is Hawaiian pizza from Dominoes.
"All the places that usually deliver are either closed or doing pickup orders only because of the storm," she said.

I said thanks and hung up the phone.

I peeked out the window and through the snow caught the faint outline of the nearby Walgreens with its lights still on.

I can totally walk there, I thought, surveying the great swaths of snow that were swirling up around the windows.

I tightened my hat, shook out the snow that had gathered underneath my gloves and pulled a pair of sweatpants on over my wet jeans, tucking them into my wet boots. 

Then I went back out into the storm.

I left the hotel and tried to map out the best route. There was a problem though.

The storm had blanketed the area so thickly, that I couldn't discern the parking lot pavement from the landscaping bumps. Nothing was plowed yet and I saw the slight outline of a guardrail  and the gentle dip of a ravine but other than that, the ground before me was all white lumps obscured by strong swirling snows.

I figured I'd just make a beeline and if I walked over a snow-covered plot of bushes or small trees, then oh well, I'd trudge my way out of it.

What the hell man? The blizzard pushed me!
I started walking. My glasses kept getting snow covered, but otherwise I was making good time.

The winds were so strong and just unrelenting. At one point, a particularly furious gust roared by and knocked me clean off my feet. I fell down harmlessly into a downy pile of snow.

I sat there and marveled at the strength of the storm.

It felt like an arm had reached out and pushed me down. A strong gust was still bearing down on me and I'm thinking these must be like 50 mile-per-hour winds.. or more, what do I know?

I weigh somewhere around 115ish and a wind strong enough to knock me down isn't something to take lightly.

I stood up, stretched out my hands and got giddy at the prospect of the wind sweeping me up and getting me airborne like the tornado in the Wizard of Oz.
This is how windy it was..

It didn't.

I got bored and called my dad to tell him about my journey. He got bored talking to me and so we hung up.

I made it to the Walgreens, my cheeks all red and my nose running uncontrollably.

"You look like you walked here," the girl lounging behind the counter said.

"Oh my god," another one said, standing up to take a better look at me. I couldn't see them very well because my glasses were all fogged up and dorky looking.

There was a group of four people there. 2 cashiers, and a man who looked like a driver and a demure-looking lady who was dressed too pish-poshy for the snow.

"I did walk here!" I told them triumphantly. "I'm staying at the hotel over there and I need supplies."

I stomped on the rug and noticed that my pants were caked with snow up to my kneecaps.

"I'm glad ya'll are open," I said.

"Me too," said the driver, laughing.

"What happened to you two?" I asked him and the lady.

He snorts, looks over to the woman he's with, "Well she got stuck in the snow, so I came to help, but then I got my plow stuck, trying to push her car out."

"Now we're waiting here for another plow truck to get us out," the woman chimed in.

"A bigger plow?" I asked.

He rubbed his beard, "Yeah, I guess so."

"We're here until 10," the cashier said.

"I'm going to grab some stuff," I told them.

I grabbed a small bottle of bubble bath (because my hotel room had a whirlpool tub, score!) a pair of socks, a  pair of underwear, and a box of contact solution with a case.

Then I went to the books aisle, frowning at the limited selection. I needed a book to read because I wanted to relax in a hot tub full of bubbles and the TV annoys me.

I've read all these books, I thought, except for the Nora Roberts ones and I'd rather burn those than purchase one. I knocked the books around and discovered a Michael Crichton book that I'd never seen before and took it.


I was starving, and the food aisle was disappointing. I settled upon soup-in-a-cup, a bag of chips and some kind of microwavable noodle concoction.

Want to annoy sister Jess? Go up to her and say Raaaaa
raaaaaaaaaaaa-ohh-lala-RUMBA-oh-laa-laaaaaaa
They rung me up and I chitchatted for a while with the group, slyly opening a bag of Sour Patch Kids and eating them. Other than us, the store was empty. They'd tuned the store's radio to a top100 pop songs station and I heard Lady GaGa.

The cashiers told me they were going to stay at the hotel once they closed the store. The plow guy was reading a gossip magazine and the lady was shuffling around uncomfortably.

I decided to leave.

When I got back to my room, it was sweltering and I was thrilled.

I happily wolfed down some junk food.

I peeled off all my wet clothes, then tried to figure out how on earth I was going to dry them.

I wanted to put my boots in the microwave but I was scared that the metal zipper would explode and then I thought maybe my soup would taste like boot later, so I threw that option out.

Using the oven was too much of a fire risk, so I settled upon the hairdryer as the safest option. I laid out my snow-drenched garments, propped up the hairdryer, turned it on and left it there.

Then I drew a bubble bath, fixed myself a steaming cup of tea then sunk my cold clammy body into the scalding water and stayed there for about an hour, reading my book and getting wet fingerprints all over it.

It felt good to decompress.

A little while after eleven p.m. ish, my phone rang. It was one of the night editors at APP calling to invite me over to the room down the hall where they had 3 bottles of wine and a scrabble board. Did I want to stop by? Heck yes!

There's a Steven King movie about a hotel room 1408 that gets me all anxious feeling about spending any kind of time by myself in hotels.

I put on the pajamas I'd taken from my trunk, and took myself down the hall.

A few of the night desk editors had gathered in the room and were talking about the hero photographer who'd drove each of them over to the hotel in his truck, making multiple trips because their cars had gotten stuck.

"We should call him and invite him here," one of the editors suggested.

"I think he went back to bring someone else over," another editor responded.

I jump in on a Scrabble match and these are newspaper people so it's a good game with high-scoring words and nobody's making any dumb word challenges.

Um, I spelled 'fart'.... mark me down for 36 points. 
"Does everyone know that 'nee' is a word?"

We all say yes.

One of the editors is on the phone with his wife. He's distressed when he hangs up. "My dog got loose, someone left the gate open and now he's missing in the blizzard," he says. "He's been missing for hours."

Turns out his family's yellow lab is the kind of dog who bolts when he gets a little taste of freedom.

"He's dead," he said.

I look out the window and it's hard to believe that a house dog could survive that long in conditions like these.

I think about how much I love my dog.

Everyone's trying to console him, saying that maybe a neighbor has the dog, or maybe he's hiding somewhere warm.

He calls home, tells them to leave everything open, the garage, the yard gates, the doors.

Less than half hour later, his family calls to say that his dog came home, shivering.

"Close everything up, don't let him out again," he says, "He can piss all over the garage for all I care, just don't let him out again."

We all cheer and toast to his pet's safe return.

Don't worry he's fine.
I return to my room around 2ish.

Surprisingly, nobody had an iPhone charger and so my phone died.

I commanded myself to awaken at 5:30 a.m. and I hoped that I'd be dependable enough to do it because my phone is my only alarm and at this point it's dead.

Acting governor Sweeney declares a state of emergency in New Jersey. He orders all nonessential people to stay off the roads, so that they can be plowed. I think back to the stuck plow truck driver that I ran into at the Walgreens.
Looked something like this... 

Tomorrow's going to be horrific, I thought to myself.

I looked out the window.

Right now, more than 20 inches of heavy snow covers the ground but the winds are building the snow drifts up high. Dense snowfall whitens up the night. 

And it's not stopping.


Stay tuned for Part IV: New Jersey is crippled by a blizzard; Morning havoc in the newsroom

I wake up to more snow that I've ever seen before in my life. I walk to the newsroom on Route 66, pass a stuck ambulence, a stuck police car, then I make it to the newsroom, where I spend the morning immersed in blizzard-havoc. Police are running around rescuing people from disabled cars, abandoned vehicles hamper plowing efforts, New Jersey's roadways are crippled, people are trapped in their homes... APP breaks a web traffic record as I struggle to take care of the site.