Winter is here and along with winter comes driving in the snow. Fun. Well, it can be. But it can also be a right bastard. This morning was just a reminder of that, though fortunately I wasn’t the object of the lesson.
Since I arrived here last year, I know that I’ve complained almost constantly about the traffic in this single-highwayed town. Well over the last 12 months, with the boom in work up here and the increasing number of projects under development, nothing has happened to ease that pain. The 30km trip is almost guaranteed to take a minimum of 1 hour if you manage to leave the office by 5:10pm. Any later than that and it just gets worse and worse. There are bypasses and over passes and things planned and under construction that will probably make a significant difference … about the time that we manage to get out of here.
This morning, after some snow overnight, someone managed to find the going a little bit more treacherous than usual and came unstuck; overturned in the ditch. Of course, they happened to pick a day when I’d had to stop for gas and so wasn’t as early as I might have been (not that it would have made too much of a difference). It meant that traffic banked up. And when it takes you an hour and 40 minutes to travel the 30kms from your door to the office, you really do wonder why the hell you bother.
And having managed to finally get past the pinch point on the road that was the accident scene, I’d only managed to go another 5kms before there was a second vehicle rolled over in the ditch (this time on the far side of the divided highway as opposed to in the ditch separating the roads. Truly the first day of the winter carnage. I’d like to propose that it be the last as well, but with the combination of weather and driver behaviour that we have up here, I just can’t see it happening.
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