3.5

I thought that I’d resolved not to write about the traffic here again, but I can’t help myself. Yesterday afternoon, the wind blew in and with it came the snow. We were all looking outside and thinking that it wasn’t a good sign for the drive home. I made sure that I got out on time to beat the major rush of traffic and thought I was doing well until I hit the gates to the plant. Things got slow after that.

As I made my way across the new overpass to the other side of the highway, things got worse. As I gazed left I saw the big red snake – tail lights being applied repeatedly giving it flashes as of light glancing of its scaled hide. When I looked right it was worse, a stream of white lights filtering down the highway to add to the tail of the snake. And they were moving at a speed that I could have beaten on foot.

I managed to get as far as taking my place in the snake and then moving at a crawl for a hundred or so metres and then came to a complete stop. It had taken me about 30 minutes to make it that far.

TWO HOURS later, we started to move again. Yes, I sat in a line of traffic on that one and only blasted route home for two hours without effectively moving (well other than for the brief moment when we all had to pull onto the shoulder to let an ambulance through).

And of course yesterday was one of those days where I had managed to leave my ipod at home and had to put up with local radio. One channel that I was listening to was supporting International Aids day and so was playing all these depressing songs about that, whilst the other was playing awful crap that at times included Christmas songs. Way to make people want to get out of their cars and shoot someone I tell you!

There’s two hills on the way home from site. You go down the first and up the second. Apparently conditions were so icy on the first of them that trucks were going down all but sideways. So they closed the highway until they could get the sanding trucks out. I’m all for safety, but damn, I sure wish it hadn’t taken 2 hours to sort that mess out. After all, it meant that it only took me three and a half hours for the trip door to door.

And of course there’s that little bit of me that really wanted to experience driving down the icy hill!