So Why Did I Drive?

Had a thoroughly miserable drive up from Long Island to the Boston area this afternoon--from about 2 PM to 8:30 PM; I normally do the drive in 3.5 to 4 hours or so. Managed to hit serious traffic in three different states. The fact that driving on a rainy Sunday summer afternoon is bad has been duly noted.

First, about a half hour into the drive, there was some type of serious accident on the Hutchinson River Parkway--as in multiple fire trucks, paramedics, and tow trucks driving up on the wrong side of the median, because traffic was completely shut down in that direction by the accident.


The entire highway was stopped--not stop and go, but literally all-lanes-stopped-with-the-cop-standing-in-front. About 45 minutes worth.


Basically, the Hutch is a very winding parkway, lots of tight banking turns--lots of fun if you're in a performance car, but with plenty of accidents as a result--given that Traffic studies found that the parkway "reasonably safe for operating speeds of only about 25 MPH". The wreck happened under that overpass--where it is both a downhill turn, and an on-ramp at the underpass.

H'okay... after that painful experience... an accident and a car fire on I-84 around Hartford. Swell.


This time, for the hell of it, I decided to get off, and let the GPS take me to the nearest movie theater, through a winding series of back roads. And the options were:


Hrm... okay, maybe not. One amusing bit--they didn't actually have a real poster for one movie--only a page from a newspaper. Back onto I-84. And in the final leg... got onto the Mass Pike, and...


Oy. I actually prefer to take the train down to New York... it's just that with a carload of tools, that's not an option.