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nice weather and congestion
Sunday, November 29 2009
setting: near Sligo Creek Park, Silver Spring, Montgomery County, Maryland
Today Gretchen and I would be driving back to upstate New York, and the day, which was sunny and a bit warmer than normal, was perfect for it. A bug in the household coffee making system (powered by Gretchen's father) had been successfully fixed yesterday and the pot of morning coffee actually contained caffeine. It had all the makings of a beautiful day.
But kitchen-based conversation lasted a bit longer than it should have and we had a late start. Still, we didn't hit bad traffic until the part of Delaware close to the Delaware River, where we crawled along for miles at roughly five miles per hour.
Somewhere along the New Jersey Turnpike we just happened to finish a CD of MP3s and turned to the radio in time to learn of bad congestion between exists 6 and 8, so we got off and took Route 130 (a four lane surface road) north for over twenty miles. There are traffic lights on 130 and they seemed to be timed in such a way as to maximize our misery.
There were a few other cases of mild congestion, but we came upon our worst patch somewhere between New Paltz and Kingston near the very end of our drive. For a couple miles there, we found ourselves trapped in traffic moving only two to six miles per hour. I found myself thinking, "All these cars are being drained away by the roadway northward, and there is no additional source of cars between here and where we're headed, so why can't we move?" It turned out that this congestion had been caused by a severe accident (the kind that suggested to Gretchen an accordion metaphor), though once we were past it, it was smooth sailing. But things weren't going so well for the Thruway's southbound traffic, which was congested for more or less the entire route. Twenty and thirty somethings were returning en masse to their crappy New York City studio apartments from childhood homes Upstate and beyond.
The house was cold when we arrived, but all the cats were quickly accounted for. Our house sitters had only managed to break one dish, and it was one I'd superglued back together twice before. I decided its demise had finally come.
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