It's that time of year again

It has started to hazardly snow and hail. Today while my parents and I were driving back from getting Backpacking gear and other stuff from Cabela's around 5:30ish, it started to hail. It was light hail, yet it was hard enough to cause the roads to be paved with ice. My Dad lost control of the Xterra we were driving on the way home swerving right and left, yet he managed to regain control after a few seconds. We immediately switched on the four wheel drive, and preceded to drive much slower. On the way, we saw about 4 accidents (it had gotten dark already). For two of those, people just managed to go to the edge of the road. Yet for the other two, they both swerved in a 360, facing oncoming traffic. One of the latter situation was an SUV that had hit the road concrete "dividier" of a free way, and had minor damages on the side of the car and on the headlights. In the first situation though, a white car was totalled in the front, and its crash had caused three cars including the one it hit to swerve to the side of the road. This is just the time of year where ice causes thousands of car accidents, esp. black ice (for those of you who don't know what that is, it's a thin layer of ice that is not seeable by a car that yet hard enough to send a car out of control. My Dad swore never to drive a Jeep again because of black ice (he had two accidents with different jeeps, one where he hit a tree, and the other where he drove off the road and into a ditch). The only reason I like ice is because it causes school to be delayed various times for 2 hours, or early dismissals.