Some Drives Are Worse Than Others

I had a lovely day in Raleigh teaching Mah Jongg at two different beautiful homes. All went well in both classes. It began to sprinkle just as I was leaving my class. I got about five minutes away from my starting point and my weather radio started blaring about a Tornado and torrential rains in my Location. I pulled the car off the highway and into a shopping center parking lot.

While buckets of rain fell on my car, and winds wiped the lose plants for sale in front of the store around the parking lot, I talked to Carter on the phone to kill the time so the tornado warning could pass. After about 20 minutes the rain slowed down and I resumed my drive home. The amount of water flowing down the street I was on was significant, but I could still drive.

As soon as I turned onto Wade Ave. I realized I was in a very long slow back up of cars. I turned on my Waze on my phone to discover a big car crash on I-40 four miles down the road that had the traffic moving very slowly. I eventually got to an Exit, where I took a meandering route around the crash and got back on 40 after the crash site.

I decided I would take the Apex exit and drive up 55 to get home. I was the first car at the light at the bottom of the exit ramp and I saw about forty emergency vehicles across the street from me with a number of banged up cars in Jimmy’s Hotdog restaurant parking lot. Before I was able to turn left onto the road, a cop pulled out In the middle of the Intersection and tied yellow police tape to his mirror and across two lanes of traffic to the light pole on the side of the road.

I was now unable to turn left and instead turned right and went down to 54 to get home. As I was meandering my way home I encountered no less than six traffic lights that were not working, probably due to a power outage caused by the horrific storm. It took forever to get through each intersection. Apparently most drivers don’t know you treat a broken traffic light as a four way stop.

I finally pulled in our driveway an hour and forty minutes after leaving Raliegh. That trip is normally 30 minutes. Thank goodness I don’t have to go far tomorrow. When I relayed this tale to Russ he told me that the police activity I encountered by Jimmy’s was a shooting. Thank goodness I missed that part of the action.