| Speaking of travel... |
[Jun. 27th, 2008|02:54 pm] |
...umm, we went to visit Hubby's maternal grandfather last weekend. And it's a good thing getting there was substantially less than half the fun.
We left Thursday after work, stopped at a Red Roof Inn in Miamisburg, Ohio (where I realized only as we were leaving that ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) evansmj lives...ahh, well), and then spent a chunk of Friday at the Newport Aquarium (highly recommended - where else are you going to pet a shark?) before really continuing on our way to Tennessee. It was around 4 pm when we left there, and we figured that with a stop for dinner, we'd get to our hotel around 9.
I started to get worried when, as we were approaching Lexington, I saw two different emergency notification signs: one warning of construction and "long delays" going around Lexington, and another warning us of an accident...30 miles ahead? Hrmpph. I scoffed - until we hit a backup starting 5 miles before the construction zone. Consulting with the MIL, who was traveling separately, we learned that the backup from the accident (an overturned semi) extended all the way back to the construction zone, and it had taken her two hours to get through the whole mess. "Forget that", Hubby and I thought, and pulled onto US-25, which previous experience with the Obligatory Kentucky Traffic Jam had taught us parallels I-75 all the way down to Corbin, where we'd intended to get off - and besides, we had a map, again thanks to a previous traffic jam. We did this, for reference, at about 5:25 pm.
We followed US-25 through Lexington and out the other side, heading south - until Plan B turned into a bust, approaching the first place where US-25 intersected I-75. There were two interchanges, two miles apart - right before the overturned semi; the near-dead-stop backup started about a mile before the first interchange. "Forget this", said Hubby, whose tolerance for sitting in traffic can best be described as "non-existent"; he eyeballed the map, concluded that if we headed vaguely east and vaguely south all would be good, and then pulled off onto the next side road we came across.
Plan C worked great - an officially-designated "Scenic Byway", following what I think was the Kentucky River. We eventually ended up on a state highway that I recognized from my map as one that intersected a different state highway that would put us back on I-75 south of the accident, which was terrific! Except that that intersection was very poorly marked, and we missed it entirely, and fell back on Dirk Gently's navigational methodology: find someone who knows like they know where they're going, and follow them. The driver of a white SUV led us down another very pretty back road, which unfortunately turned north rather than south, to the city of Winchester, Kentucky - fortunately big enough to have its own detail insert on the map. We pulled into a DQ at about 8:30 pm to obtain food and "consult the sacred scrolls" for Plan D; note that in three hours, we have made about 25 miles of progress, most of it in the wrong direction.
Hubby and I were of two separate minds on Plan D: he found a collection of state highways that would connect up with our originally-planned route about a half hour away from our eventual destination; I found out that the state highway I'd missed actually went through Winchester, and would take us right back to I-75, theoretically south of the backup. His objection to my route was that it put us back on I-75, and he was fed up with the freeway; mine to his route was that we only had an hour of daylight left, and I wasn't really keen on trying to navigate through the mountains in the dark, map or no map. He relented, in the name of family harmony, and off we went. Plan D was working out really well - this was a good road; we found the spot Plan C had gone wrong; it was only going to take us about 20 minutes to get to I-75... Based on landmarks we had passed and comparison to the map, we were about a mile from the freeway when we hit another backup, and it made the previous backup on US-25 look like the Autobahn; the only movement at all was related to cars we saw up ahead turning around. Hubby joined them, and we went back to Winchester, starting on the state highway route he'd found - except that we'd eaten up our hour of daylight. (In my defense, if I was right about where we were, the backup would not have been there had Plan C worked out; based on the rate of accumulation of cars and the approximate length of the backup, whatever was going on had happened while we were sitting at Dairy Queen.)
Plan E actually worked out better than I expected; the roads were mostly good (if you overlook the fact that in a lot of places the road was more like a lane-and-a-half wide), and the signs were pretty clear (which relieved my big fear). The only problem was that it was getting late - we had no greater relief than when we pulled into the parking lot of our hotel, around 12:30 AM, because we were both nodding off.
And yes, that means that frakking semitruck ate three and a half hours of my life - worse, three and a half hours of my vacation. Honestly, had I been driving, I'd've stuck it out on US-25 (although I wouldn't've gotten back on the freeway there - my plan all along had been to wait until we see traffic moving on the freeway and then get back on at the next interchange), and I don't think it would've taken more than half an hour to get through the backup - but by the end of that half hour, Hubby would have been ready to kill something, even as a passenger. |
|
|
giggly
full
curious
weird
nostalgic
happy
pleased
cheerful
discontent
tired
comedy = tragedy + time
bouncy
busy
annoyed