Let It Snow

Let me tell you of my commute today. For various reasons I decided to drive to work rather than take the bus. I left the house with the aim of picking up a slug so I could take the HOV-2 lanes. What should have been a five minute drive to the p
Park & Ride turned into a half hour, stop-and-go nightmare. Why you ask? Because DC received <1" of snow.

We Washingtonians get a bad rap. Being in the middle of the Atlantic coast we get our share of all types of weather: hurricanes, snow, thunderstorms, down pours, heat waves, but none of them consistently. If you go to Maine or Minnesota everyone knows how to drive in the snow as it is on the ground for 95% of the year. In Portland and Seattle rain is constantly falling, and those people know how to drive in the rain. Well, here we don't get enough of any one thing, making us the proverbial Jacks, so traffic snarls to a stop each time we get snow.

So, the five minute drive to the Park & Ride became half an hour. On my way I called Kristin. She asked if I'd considered parking the car and taking the bus in. I had until I saw that the line for the bus was at least 200 people long. I often get in line when there are thirty or forty people in line, and that means a wait of a bus or two. That is when buses are coming every six minutes, though, and all the buses were trapped in the traffic I steered my car into as I whipped through the Park & Ride and onto the Toll Road.

BAM. I hit a wall of traffic. The second leg of my trip, from the Park & Ride to the 495 exchange, regularly a fifteen minute drive, took fifty minutes. I bored of one Christmas CD and put in another. I listened to traffic, I contemplated the cosmos, and I renewed my vow that I will live less than fifteen minutes away from my next job.

Oddly enough, once inside the Beltway, I flew the last leg of the trip, making it to the office in twenty minutes - a good time for off rush hour.

You may ask, "In what type of weather are Washingtonians experts at driving?" Heat, or better said, the hot air produced by politicians. How else can you explain our hot and muggy summers? Oh, and have you ever stopped to consider that they leave town for recess in August, then fall comes in September. Coincidence? I think not.