Traffic yesterday (and today) was pretty insane. The president of China was in town and that just led to the perfect storm or weird traffic. I've been driving from where I work to where I live for about 5 years now so I've seen all the traffic patterns, or so I thought. Usually when there is a backup on the highway across the water I'll take a shortcut through the side roads to get closer to the bridge.
As I write this I'm going to say things like the highway was all black, which means the road was totally stop and go. This is based on the traffic maps we all study very intently when deciding how to get home. Green means wide open, yellow some slow going, red heavy volume, and black you better not have had too much water before you left the office.
So, when I left the main highway was black all the way to the point where it makes more sense to go the shortcut. Little did I know, things weren't going to go like they usually do. I first noticed some weird traffic when I was headed down one of the main side streets and noticed that cars were lined up and not moving going in the opposite direction. There usually isn't much volume headed that way at that time, so I thought maybe I'd get lucky and nobody would be taking the same route as me. Everything was going fine until I approached the intersection to the second major side street that I take to get onto the highway. From about a block or so away I could see that cars weren't moving and backed up all the way to the intersection I was headed towards. In all my years of doing this commute I had never seen this happen and thought it was just an anomaly and would begin moving soon.
Well, after I got onto that street I found out how wrong I was. At this point there was no alternative for me so I was resigned to just sit there and inch forward. At one point I lamented that I didn't take the turn to go the super secret squirrel way when you have 2 people in your car, only to realize that I hadn't even reached it yet. This was about 30 minutes after I had turned onto this street and I hadn't reached the light that usually only takes a minute or two. As we all inched closer I decided to check how things were going on the highway, expecting it to be much worse than when I left. Using the real time traffic map on my phone I discovered to my surprise, and horror, it was now all green. In the 45 minutes since I had left my office it had gone from all black to all green, it didn't make any sense. How could it have emptied out that quickly? Not believing what I was seeing I checked out the traffic cameras and saw that it, indeed, was wide open with only a few cars. I began getting really frustrated know that if I had just gone on the highway to begin with I probably would have been home by now.
About an hour after I left I was finally getting on the highway. Expecting it to be wide open I was pretty surprised to see that it was now all black again. In the span of 15 minutes it had gone from wide open to stop and go again. So during this trek it had gone from all black to all green back to all black, all in the span of an hour. This was insane! It was kind of like the 15 minutes of wide open highway was the eye of a hurricane. After a commute of about an hour and 20 minutes I finally made it home, cursing the commute that I have slowly begun to hate more and more every day.
Once home, I had to turn around rather quickly so we could get to the baseball game. When we got downtown, 5th was a mess because the president of China was staying at the Olympic between 4th and 5th on University so a bunch of streets were closed. With no other option we stayed on 5th and tried to navigate our way through confused drivers. At one point, a pedestrian decided was a good idea to run across the street against the light. I narrowly avoided him by slamming on the brakes, but a small part of me thought it would have been a little cathartic to have nicked him just a little bit. That was just the frustration that had built up sitting in traffic for so long and the anger at how stupid some people are. Anyway, we finally got to the game, grabbed some hot dogs, and got into our seats in the bottom of the first so we hadn't missed too much.
So you would think that was the end of my car saga, but it isn't. This morning when I got out to my car I doesn't some things just didn't look right inside. Once I got in I realized things were definitely out of place. The glove compartment was open, the trash tray was too and some things were strewn about. It looks like someone broke into my car in the night, but luckily all the made off with was my sunglasses. All things considered, that isn't too bad but I sure will miss those glasses. Whoever it was totally missed the windbreaker in the back seat, the change tray next to the steering wheel, and didn't look in the trunk (probably due to the fact that the sticker for the trunk lever fell off a few weeks back). As I was making my way downtown to drop my car off for some scheduled service I noticed that it smelled a little like b.o. inside. A nice little present left for me from the scoundrel who absconded with my sunglasses.
Well, I got to stew about this personal violation for a while because traffic was again a mess downtown thanks to the chinese presidente. It took me about a half hour to go the 8 or so blocks to the mechanic. That just capped off a great couple of days. Let's just hope they don't find anything wrong with my car.
Maybe I'll buy a lottery ticket tonight because my luck has to change...right?
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