These Bluffton flight attendants laughed through this icy I-95 nightmare – here’s why

It wasn’t yet dawn when the chaos started.

Tamar Berg and Candice Skingley watched through the windshield of their rental car as fellow motorists, stuck in the same three-hour-long traffic jam, got fed up and began making their own way out.

A sports car pulled off Interstate 95, turned perpendicular to the road, got a running start and raced down into the median, then up the other side before attempting to merge with traffic in the southbound lanes near Pooler, Ga.

Another car followed suit.

And another.

People were making, in Skingley’s words, “desperate decisions.”

She and Berg wondered if they would have to sleep in their car.

They wondered if they had enough gas.

And, like a lot of other folks on I-95 around 3 a.m. Thursday – hours after a freak snow-and-ice storm glazed roads in coastal Georgia and South Carolina – they wondered how long they could ... hold it.

That was the hot topic for motorists using the Waze app, which helps drivers find shortcuts, alerts them to hazards and, on this cold, dark morning, provided some much needed levity.

“That basically was the whole conversation,” Berg, 34, a JetBlue flight attendant from Bluffton, said Friday, laughing as she remembered the ordeal. “How bad people had to pee.”

She and Skingley, 33, a fellow Bluffton resident and JetBlue flight attendant, were so close, just a few miles from their personal cars – and a bathroom – at Savannah Hilton Head International Airport.

They’d picked up their rental car in Jacksonville, Fla., around 7 p.m. Wednesday. Before that, they’d sat in John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York watching as southbound flights, one after another, were canceled.

The Savannah airport was a no-go. So was Charleston. And there was nothing into Atlanta.

Jacksonville was it.

So that’s where they flew, even though it would mean an hours-long drive to Bluffton, even though Skingley had worked a red-eye flight earlier in the day, even though her friends and family told her to stay put.

But she and Berg didn’t want to get stuck in New York as the storm jogged north.

They hadn’t planned to meet at JFK International – it just happened.

“She walked by and yelled my name,” Berg said. “She recognized me.”

Skingley remembered her co-worker from Facebook. Despite working for the same airline and living in the same town, the two had never met face-to-face. Now, they were about to spend more than 12 hours together.

In cramped quarters.

In stressful conditions.

And after a lot of coffee.

That’s the first thing they did when they landed in Jacksonville – go to Starbucks. And the flimsy plastic cup that carried Skingley’s caffeine would come in handy later when, sometime after 3 a.m. the next morning, they finally made it to Savannah Hilton Head International, dropped off the rental car and ...

... found their own vehicles were frozen over.

They didn’t have an ice scraper, so they used the Starbucks cup, a water bottle and a dog bowl – one Skingley had been meaning to donate to the Humane Society – to break the glaze on their windshields.

They were still in their flight attendant uniforms.

“Tamar was still wearing heels,” Skingley said, chuckling.

They finished the job and got in their cars, Berg following Skingley.

Skingley, originally from wintry Buffalo, N.Y., had driven from Jacksonville to Savannah. Berg, originally from Hilton Head Island, only has childhood memories of the Christmas 1989 snow that blanketed the Lowcountry.

“She taught me about black ice,” Berg said, impressed with her colleague’s driving.

Both women pulled into their driveways just before 6 a.m.

What is typically commute of 30-plus minutes had taken more than 12 hours.

“I think that we were guided the entire way,” Skingley said. “Whatever the universe was doing, it was bending over backwards for us. ... Our guardian angels were breaking a sweat.”

A situation that might have tested a relationship instead forged one.

“I don’t know if it’s because we’re flight attendants and we’re used to meeting people, but it was like I’d known her for 20 years,” Berg said.

“I made a new friend.”

This story was originally published January 6, 2018 at 8:00 AM with the headline "These Bluffton flight attendants laughed through this icy I-95 nightmare – here’s why."