New London — In my 20-plus years at The Day, this was a first.

As the health and environment reporter for the last decade or so of my time here, I’ve kayaked, hiked rocky slopes, waded into rivers, slogged across marshes and ridden some incredibly rough dirt roads to get a story. But never has just getting from my house to the office itself been the story.

A little after 9 a.m. Tuesday, with my street still unplowed and both my small car and my husband’s truck unable to push through those millions of ice particles, I opted for a more primitive transportation option. Since only two and a half miles separate my home from The Day, I clicked on my cross-country skis and ventured out. My husband, Tom Clark, joined me for the journey, eager for our first cross-country ski outing of the winter. I was pretty sure Gov. Malloy’s travel ban didn’t apply to this 5,000-year-old form of locomotion. In those years, cross-country skiing has morphed into a form of recreation and competitive sport, but its utilitarian origins haven’t been entirely lost.

The first block was a slow slog, with drifts to our knees and deeper resisting our forward motion. Once we made it to Montauk Avenue, though, the going got much easier. Plows had opened a trench through the middle, leaving a coating of compacted snow to glide us along. Walled in by the big old houses that line the street, we were mostly protected from the wind whipping off the Thames River a block away.

For most of the way, the normally busy thoroughfare lay subdued and muffled under the white layers, with life stirring only in a few blackbirds, a handful of humans on foot and one or two plow trucks. Lawrence + Memorial Hospital stood out as an island of seeming normalcy, with ambulances and paramedic vehicles leaving and entering as ever.

At Cumberland Farms, a young man approached the still unplowed driveway on foot, then walked away forlornly when he found it still closed. One other cross-country skier passed us going the other way. A man shoveling out his car, cigarette dangling from his mouth, said the skiing looked like fun.

“Just like the bunny slope at Stratton,” he said.

On Bank Street, there were a few more signs of life — a few people walking in the middle of the street, or swinging shovels and pushing snow blowers on the sidewalks.

“That’s the way to burn some calories,” Adam Campos, manager of Bean & Leaf, called out to us, as he unlocked the front door or the coffee shop.

As we slid down Bank Street, gusts blew clouds of flakes aloft, shrouding the shuttered shops and restaurants behind a curtain of haze. At The Parade Plaza, deep drifts made the going hard again, but we persevered across. A few dozen strides more, and we were at the back door of The Day.

On a normal day, walking from my home to the office takes about 45 minutes. But during Winter Storm Juno, those two and a half miles had taken us about an hour and 15 minutes. It was a journey that felt familiar and fresh at the same time, special for being in a place that’s become ordinary in circumstances that weren’t.

j.benson@theday.com