Keeping up with the rest

Every day I drive to work and back home again. After a leisurely weekend, it's always a dose of reality to hit the freeways.

It never ceases to amaze me where the typical slowdowns occur. There's no accident. There's no debris on the roadway. And yet, there are brakelights going in all the lanes on the freeway.

There was one memorable afternoon where there actually was an actual highway accident. I have a short commute compared to a lot of locals ~ just over 16.5 miles. It normally takes me about 25 minutes to get from my work to the kids school. But on this one particularly afternoon, it took almost an hour. That's right. SIXTY minutes to drive 16.5 miles. How sad is that? I ended up taking an off-ramp that I normally wouldn't take and then go an around-about route to my kids school. If I hadn't? It would have taken me another 30 minutes minimum to get to them. What caused the traffic you might ask. A FedEx truck happened to jack-knife on the freeway about 2 exits north of mine. A handful of other cars were involved and there was diesel fuel all over the freeway. Cars had to be diverted off the freeway into the carpool lands -- which means they had to remove the cement barriers (H-rails?) to let cars in. Big mess, eh?

Sadly most of the time my on-ramp is where things start to get slow. It's amazing that when I get on the roadway and it's stop and go for about 10 miles. But That's just going to work. And since this occurs about 9 out of 10 days, I kind of resigned myself to the fact that I'll have to deal with the slowness. I just turn on my music and sing away.

Going home? The traffic tends to be slow as well. And while I basically expect it? Going home I get more agitated. What irks me the most? Is when there are drivers that don't keep up with the flow of traffic. I mean, when we're going 30 mph what's the problem? KEEP UP PEOPLE!

When there are no issues on the freeway, you kind of expect folks to keep up. So why do I end up seeing folks who are going 15 or 20 miles below the posted speed limit? Everyone else is going 65 or 70 and there's some fool in the 2nd to the right lane going 50. Move it over! What's sad to me is that most are just plain oblivious to their lack of speed and how everyone is having to move around them.

But alas, tomorrow is the start of another workweek. We'll see what the freeways have in store for me. I have to tell you though it won't be SO bad. I actually am taking 1-1/2 days off this week. Yeah! So you slow drivers will have one less car zigging around you!