The Road To Frustration

Well I’m back from hiatus after another full week of not blogging.  I spent last week in Minneapolis for work and to be quite honest, my days went by so fast I hardly remember it.  I had training from 8:30 to 4:30 or so everyday, and by the time I got back to the hotel, showered, and went out for dinner, it was almost time for bed.  The training was pretty much as useless as I expected it to be, but like I said before, I’m not complaining.  I basically had a week off from work and all I had to do was go through the motions at training, and once I finished up I was able to almost completely dismiss everything I learned.

But it’s not the training week I’m going to write about, but rather the precursor to it.

My week got off to a hell of a rocky start last Sunday when I was driving.  Before we get into details, it’s worth mentioning that the drive is always a personal challenge for me.  It’s 325 miles from Grand Forks to Minneapolis and it gets pretty boring, especially driving alone, so my aim is to be in the car for as little time as possible.  When I left, I did everything I was taught to do as a kid before a road trip.  I checked my suitcase to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, I packed a snack for the road, and I went to the little boys’ room to go potty.  I was gunning for a record time on this trip and I didn’t want anything to hamper my pursuit of the perfect road trip.  My target time from my parking lot to the hotel parking lot was four hours and40 minutes, aggressive, but not unattainable.

Chasing the perfect road trip means a lot of things have to go right.  I didn’t think traffic would be bad since I was leaving in the morning, I wouldn’t have to stop and eat, and I was only planning on one stop to get gas and use the bathroom.  Nothing could stop me.  Well, almost nothing.

Turns out, I was taking my victory lap a little too early.  About two hours into my trip I got word that traffic was at a dead stop about 20 miles north of Minneapolis.  At first I didn’t know what had happened, but I heard that I-94 was a parking lot and people were being rerouted slowly but surely because of an accident.

At the time I was first hearing of this stuff, I was still almost two hours away from where the backup was, so I didn’t pay it much mind.  I was getting updates from my buddy Tanner, who was also on the road at the time and was roughly 40 miles ahead of me, and I decided to play it by ear.  I didn’t want to get all worked up about something I figured wouldn’t even be there by the time I got there, so I pressed on.

After another hour, the news was still the same.  Now I was getting irritated.  This traffic mess was on the verge of impeding my quest for road trip perfection.  As I grew closer to the debacle, I called Jess and asked her to hit Google Maps for me and start looking at alternate routes.  Since I was going to stop in Clearwater, that was where I got off the interstate.  For those who aren’t familiar with the area, instead of driving in a straight line on I-94 right to my hotel, I was going to have to make a giant horseshoe-shaped detour just to avoid the impending doom ahead of me.

So I exit, fill up with gas, use the boys’ room, and start my trek.  Once I get onto the first part of the detour I encounter the thing I dreaded seeing, but figured was coming: gridlock.  I spent the next 45 minutes driving 10-20 mph – when I wasn’t at a dead stop – until I finally got back on the interstate.  Turns out I wasn’t the only person driving to Minneapolis that day, because there were only cars as far as the eyes could see in both directions.

It was a good thing I didn’t have any strict time constraints because my target time got destroyed.  Instead of getting there in less than five hours, I was on the road for almost seven.  When I got to the hotel, I was exhausted.  Turns out sitting on my ass for seven hours was akin to running half a marathon.  Who knew?

As it turns out, the reason the entire interstate was closed for a stretch of five or six miles was due to an elderly couple (who I affectionately referred to as “those old fuckers”) who missed their exit near Albertville, MN, and instead of driving one more mile down the road and taking the next exit, they slammed on the brakes in an effort to make an illegal u-turn.  This caused a tanker truck driver to slam on his brakes, jackknife, and subsequently roll over, spilling 8,000 gallons of fuel onto the interstate.  Well done, old fuckers.

Incredibly and thankfully, no one was seriously hurt, but according to the Monday night news, approximately ten thousand drivers were affected by the accident on Sunday. The busiest interstate in Minnesota was closed for nearly nine hours while the spill was cleaned up.  There were dozens of stories of people who missed flights home or weren’t able to pick up their kids from daycare, or the romantic tale of a wife who wasn’t able to visit her husband on their 25th anniversary because the visiting hours at the jail were over by the time she got there.  No, I’m not making that up.

In any case, that was without question the most interesting thing that happened to me last week, and all because a couple of senior citizens missed their exit to the outlet stores in Albertville and just couldn’t wait one more minute to buy knee socks and bingo dabbers at reduced prices.

Moving onto more pleasant thoughts, I go back to work today, and that’s followed by two days off Wednesday and Thursday for me to head back to … wait for it … Minneapolis, for the John Legend concert.  Jess scored us front row tickets for my birthday (which is Sunday; send gifts) so big ups to her for that.  I’ll report back later in the week because I’ve got a couple things stuck in my craw that I imagine I’ll need to vent about before I snap and swing a cat by its tail into a brick wall.

One love,

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