True life: I got stranded in the great Israeli snowstorm of 2013

Follow the twists and lurches of Highway 395 from the Charedi outpost of Beit Shemesh “>Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — say more than a century ago, which probably means never. From a front-row seat inside the blinding white snow globe that engulfed middle Israel on Friday night, with hardly enough oxygen between snowflakes to breathe anything but ice, I'm leaning Team Netanyahu.

So how did one stupid American (plus her furious boyfriend) end up stranded on Highway 395 with a missing mitten and icy swimming pools in her city boots last Friday, as the cloud cover darkened toward Shabbat, worst possible hour to get stuck anywhere in Israel, much less the religious outlying villages of Jerusalem?

Hear me out. Sitting in soggy, thunderstormy Tel Aviv, watching historic and heart-stopping photos light up the Internet — a snow-coated Western Wall and “>Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, a snowball fight at the “>Forest of the Martyrs. A row of police vehicles blocked the sherut from soldiering any further up the hill. So the driver, finally resigned to the fact that there was not a single road open to Jerusalem, gave us a choice: Either come back with him to Tel Aviv, or walk the rest of the way to Jerusalem, which he said was about three kilometers east.

You would think, stranded in the goddamn FOREST OF THE MARTYRS on a near-freezing winter day with a snowfall scheduled that night, even the stupidest American would snap a photo of the snow, resign the adventure while she was ahead and return home for some Hobbit II. But, I don't know — we had already come so far, I was restless for a good snow hike and around four or five of our co-passengers had decided to make the three-kilometer trek. Who were we to wuss out?

The problem, as we would come to realize a few hundred meters down the road, was that when our driver had estimated the distance to Jerusalem, he had rounded down by about 15 kilometers.

The Asian tourists had already disappeared up ahead. (I'm still not sure what happened to them; best case scenario, they were among