Commuting Nightmares

As you know if you live in the midwest, Chicago was hit with their first big snow of the year on Thursday afternoon and evening. All in all, we got almost 10" at my house.

Needless to say, Murphy made it certain that the one day I don't get to ride the convenient, on-time-even-in-a-blizzard el was Thursday. Yes, I had to head out to my company's suburban location via the automobile. And, of course, I had a basketball playoff game in my city league that evening. Knowing this had the makings of a problem, I knew I would need to leave early. My game was at 6:30, and so I decided I would leave at 3:30 to make certain I made the normally one hour trip in time.

As indicated above, that's just after the snow began to fall. To make a long story short, traffic began to move slower and slower. The commute was becoming a hectic mess. I still held out hope of making it when, frustrated with the standstill on the interstate, I exited to travel via local roads. Needless to say, after some moments of hope, my time winnowed away.
Now, as you may know, I grew up in Minnesota. Despite the snow we were having, I was not ever in danger on the road, at least from myself, due to my Minnesota experience. In fact, I don't think the snow in and of itself would have added a tremendous amount of time to my trip. The other drivers on the road, however, that was a problem. Let's just say that there definitely were some people I wanted to go around. There were some terribly slow drivers. Now, maybe they didn't have a clue how to drive in snow and were thus taking it safe, which was probably the case, but regardless I sat frustrated in the car.

I finally made it to my destination at 7. I had spent 3.5 hours squirming in the drivers seat. The trip is about 30 miles. I had made a roaring average of under 10 mph. Consequently, I had arrived just in time to see my team be forced to forfeit (I was only our 3rd player to get there).

The lesson as always, don't make plans.