Snowed in-- in SoCal!

I'm not kidding! I didn't make it in for work today because I was snowed in and couldn't get back from San Diego!
I dragged Virginia down for the three day weekend. We saw our old friends Bill, Heather, and Mercedes, and I stopped in on Karen and Gina. It rained the whole time, which may have tempered V's experience. But we did have an interesting visit to the La Brea Tar Pits, a wet trip to Mission Beach, a stroll through the Prado, and enough beach to hold me over for a bit longer.
On Monday, we left around noon for the 8-9 hour trip. Not long after, our friends were calling saying that I-5 was closed at the Grapevine due to snow and ice. We stopped in LA to reconsider our options. Rallying all our technology, from the laptop to the phones to the Thomas Guide, we decided not to die and instead take the 101 north. Traffic continued to crawl. At 7 pm, we had gone 215 miles in about 6 hours and were approaching Santa Barbara. We discovered we were able to love technology and LaSalsa at the same time, finding the city's last cheap hotel room between bites of burrito. The room didn't have a heater, but it was welcome and warm compared to the pounding rain. We slept, had breakfast in the Danish town of Solvang, and tackled the remaining 7 hours of our trip in the scant daylight. When I said I went to San Diego because I wanted to see the water, this is not what I had in mind!