I spent that last couple of hours pondering which subject I should cover tonight. There are so many, but most of them I find it difficult to find a different take to pontificate with. Others would likely take me a few days to do even a poor job. Then after running some errands it came to me.
Traffic.
I have to admit to being spoiled when it comes to traffic, living in a semi-rural area in a rural state. It isn’t often I have to deal with city traffic, or city-like traffic. However, over the past three days I have had to deal with, and worse, traffic like what one would see on a late afternoon/early evening on the Friday of a holiday weekend...but on a Thursday.
It started with a trip to a town next to Manchester, NH to meet up with the older WP Sister. I was taking the WP Mom to meet up with her so she could spend a few days with her and the younger WP sister. Traffic on the way south was very heavy and I could see the traffic heading the opposite direction was even heavier. Heading home was an adventure, taking almost twice as long to get home as it took make the meet with my sister,and that trip took 50% longer than it should have. It was bumper-to-bumper traffic most of the way back until I was able to bail off the highway and take back roads that paralleled the the highways but were carrying normal traffic.
It was certainly unexpected for a Thursday.
Yesterday was a repeat, but this time going to a place I visit regularly to meet up with a work friend for lunch. A trip that normally took 20 minutes to make, even on a Friday, took me 45 minutes. It took almost that long to make the trip back. Again, traffic was bumper to bumper and for no reason I could discern. Even close to The Gulch traffic was quite heavy.
Today I had a number of errands to run. I usually run them starting just after 7 in the morning, finishing the first batch by 8:30. I start the second batch just after lunch.
The reason for the gap is that normally traffic gets heavy, at least heavy for around here, starting around 10 as people head out to go grocery shopping or hit Walmart or have breakfast at a local diner or run other errands. It stays that way until just after noon. But it didn’t happen that way today.
As soon as I left The Gulch the traffic was heavy. This was at 7:15. I got to my first stop – Walmart - and found I had to park quite some distance away as the lot had far more cars and trucks than I usually see. It was not the quick 20 minute ‘in-and-out’ shopping trip it usually is for me. Rather, it took almost twice as long. The trip to my second stop was usually 5 minutes, but it took quite a bit longer as traffic was backed up at each of the three traffic lights I had to go through to get to my next stop. Then it was off to my last stop before returning to The Gulch, a trip that normally takes 10 minutes took twice that long as yet again the traffic was backed up, but this time through the five traffic lights along the route. At least the trip between my third stop and home wasn’t too bad.
In the 18 years I have lived in my town and all the times I have run those morning errands I have never seen traffic like this.
And then there were my afternoon errands which saw pretty much the same kind of traffic.
Is this just an anomalous phenomenon that won’t be seen again until Labor Day weekend, or is it becoming the new normal, at least here? I hope it isn’t the latter.
I certainly can’t speak about traffic elsewhere in the state, but here in central New Hampshire it’s not what I normally see, even on holiday weekends.
