Of the hundreds of vehicles that slid off Richmond area roads last night, perhaps none less deserved the insult of immobility than a busload of college students from the Cleveland area.
"I guess I shouldn't have trusted my GPS," said Dan Read, at the wheel of a Lakeside Lines charter bus from John Carroll University in University Heights, Ohio.
With a load of 50 goodwill workers from the school who had met yesterday with former prison inmates in Richmond, Read followed his global positioning system onto an unplowed entrance ramp on North Fifth Street to Interstates 95 and 64.
The 23-ton bus made it halfway up the ramp before the wheels started spinning. Read backed the bus back down the ramp, only to have the rear wheels slip sideways into a guardrail.
"We couldn't moved forward or backward," Read said, adding that the group's Richmond contacts warned him that the area doesn't have enough plows to keep the roads cleared, especially in a sudden storm.
"This never would have happened in Cleveland," he said.
The bus got underway after waiting about 90 minutes for a tow truck. The student volunteers, part of the Minneapolis-based nonprofit group Students Today Leaders Forever, spent the time singing songs and making light of their plight.
The snow interrupted the group's plans in Baltimore to help refurbish a blighted neighborhood; it may sidetrack plans for another day of working with the Boaz & Ruth organization in Richmond; and it could alter plans for the next stop in Raleigh, N.C., which also got hit by snow.
"You can tell we pretty much go with the flow. Whatever happens, happens," said student bus leader Abby Gehring, cocking an ear toward the singing students in the back of the bus. "We're trained to deal with about anything." The group plans to do good deeds at a half-dozen stops before making it to Florida for spring break.
It was close to midnight before a tow truck from Broyles Auto & Wrecker Service pulled the bus free and Read took the flattest route he could find to First Presbyterian Church on Cary Street Road where the group planned to spend the night.
But for Troy Barrett, the Broyles tow truck operator who freed the Cleveland 50, the night was still young.
"This was our 10th job of the night -- cars in ditches, a sand and gravel truck off the road. We're just getting started."
Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or bmckelway@timesdispatch.com.
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