trilogy of accidents

The commute last night was terrible. It took me 2.5 hours to get home. It took about an hour to get on to Rt 3.

Right before Rt 3, I had to pee really bad. I was trying to see if there was a spot that I could pull over and just take a whiz on the side of the road. As I approached Rt 3, I saw that the entire Turnpike was shut down. All the traffic that would've gone on to the Turnpike, instead was forced on to Rt 3. It was a mess.

I took the first "exit" on Rt 3 which was a small Hess station. I looked to see if they had a bathroom, but they didn't. The next "exit" was Best Buy. I went in and ran to the bathroom. I figured, this was a good a place as any to try and wait out the traffic a bit. I wasn't really in a rush because dinner wasn't until 7:00 PM EST anyway.

I walked around, looked at some TVs and found that some of the Samsung TVs seemed kind of dark. Not all of them, so I suspected it was just an issue with the floor model. I really liked some of the Panasonic TVs that were there. After looking at the 30" TVS, I felt like they were all sort of small. I know they aren't really, but that's the way it seemed. In my search for TVs, I saw a 42" Samsung one for a little more than $1K USD. I may get that one.

Around 6:30, I looked out at Rt 3 and saw that it hadn't gotten any better. I figured, If I'm going to wait, I might as well wait in the car. That, and I wasn't sure when the traffic would lighten up. So I hit the road again.

I wasn't sure whether M was home, but I gave her a call anway. She wasn't, but I asked her brother to see if he could find out what had happened to cause all this traffic. After a few minutes, I found that there was a pretty bad accident on the Turnpike. That would explain why the Turnpike was shut down. That was enough, so I went back to driving. A few minutes later, M's brother called me back and told me that a train crashed or something. That would explain a lot more of the traffic. Later on, I found that 2 trains had crashed or derailed or something. There was also a fatality on the Turnpike.

Once I got past 21, the traffic started to clear up. It wasn't totally clear, but it wasn't slow either. I got onto 46; I was about to get on to 80, when I saw just a parking lot full of red tail lights. I quickly changed lanes on got on to 23 instead. I managed to make a U-Turn and got back on to 46. 46 was clear until it merged with Bloomfield Ave. But that was expected.

I finally made it to Bennigan's, where my men's group was meeting. And I was only 35 minutes late. Not too bad.