Many drivers got stuck on their way home from work during Wednesday's snowstorm, and a few of them called The Sun to talk about it. Here are some of their stories:

'At least I'm not stuck … in a ditch'

Alexis Rea left downtown about 5 p.m. Wednesday and pulled onto Interstate 83, thinking the highway would be a better choice during the storm because she did not know how the secondary roads were holding up.

She wanted to get off just a few miles north at Northern Parkway, but an emergency worker told her four cars had gotten stuck on the ramp, blocking it.

"I thought to myself, OK, I'll go up north," she said.

But less than a mile away, traffic stopped moving entirely. By that time it was 8:30, and Rea was still sitting in her car at 12:10 a.m. — more than seven hours after she had merged onto the roadway.

In an interview from her car after midnight Thursday, Rea said that for the first several hours, drivers remained in their vehicles and tried to keep warm. They got out only when necessary to clear their windshields, "and that was done as quickly as possible."

As the weather started to clear, the stranded motorists got more chatty and shared what little information they had from the radio or calls to friends. After 9 p.m., when it was apparent nobody was going anywhere fast, people started turning their cars off intermittently to save fuel.

Rea took some solace in her predicament.

"At least I'm not stuck out on a secondary road in a ditch," she said. "It stinks, but at least I've got a lot of company."

She hopes she does not have to return Thursday to her downtown office where she does medical research. She has to only if the patients scheduled actually show up to their appointments.

Rea said the wait was frustrating but that yelling about it would not get her home any faster.

"I did curse myself for not leaving earlier."

—Baltimore Sun

'What else are you going to do?'

Roy Hutchison, 43, who works in McLean, Va., left work about 3:45 p.m. Wednesday to head home to Columbia, but he was not home by 9 p.m.

He said he got stuck around Route 29 North about 7:30 p.m., and unluckily so, after he said he decided not to stop and get food at McDonald's.

And since then, traffic has moved "in spurts of 10 to 20 feet."

"All along the way, there has been different cars getting themselves into different kinds of trouble," he said. But some were making the most of it by starting an impromptu snowball fight, he said.

"What else are you going to do?"

He said the road is covered in snow and his own Honda Pilot, which has four-wheel drive, was covered in 3 inches of snow.

From his car, he was uploading snow photos and texting from his phone, but said he couldn't be cited for driving and texting since his car remained in park.

—Jessica Anderson

'20 times more treacherous than last year'

Pikesville resident Michael Schwartzberg was driving home from his office in Towson and had not arrived more than two and a half hours into his commute.

He said he had driven to work before, during and after twin blizzards struck the Baltimore area in February but that this time, the weather was far worse.

"Tonight's commute is 20 times more treacherous than last year," said Schwartzberg, who said a FedEx tractor-trailer jackknifed in front of him on 695 West near Greenspring Avenue. A van also did a 360 in the same area but neither vehicle hit anything.

At 8 p.m., he said he had been sitting on the exit ramp for Reisterstown Road from the Beltway outer loop for more than an hour and a half and had seen only one plow on his side of Interstate 695. A convoy of 15 to 20 had been through the inner loop but still had not appeared for motorists on the other side.

"For a storm we knew was coming, I'm not sure why it's so difficult to traverse the roads this evening," he said.

—Baltimore Sun

Alexis Rea's last name was misspelled in earlier versions of this article. The Baltimore Sun regrets the error.