I am your traffic jam entertainment

It's about a 5 1/2 hour drive from Durham to Columbia, and we had planned to leave at 10 and get there by 4. But the traffic gods were not with us that day! First, we got a late start because we had forgotten something and had to turn back. That only added about a half hour to the trip so we were still feeling optimistic at that point.

Then, we got stuck in a horrendous traffic jam in Dinwiddie, VA. (Dinwiddie is where I got a speeding ticket a few years back, and I must say it's one of my least favorite places on the east coast.) We learned later than a truck had overturned and dumped its load across the northbound highway. It took 2 hours to get off I-85, drive through downtown Dinwiddie (now choked with detour traffic) and get back to the highway.

By the time we got off the highway, I really had to go to the bathroom. So we stopped at the first gas station we saw. So did a lot of other people and we had a couple of nice conversations with people who had been with us in traffic. One woman came over and took pictures, saying that she had taken some during the traffic jam but she was afraid they wouldn't come out. I was really wishing I had gotten one of those "I am your traffic jam entertainment" bumper stickers from the artcarz list!

Later in the day Georg posed the question, if we are their traffic jam entertainment, who is our traffic jam entertainment? At first I jokingly said that it's the burden of the art car driver, to provide entertainment value for everyone else, without reciprocation. But then we decided that our entertainment was watching people be entertained by us. It is pretty amusing to see the range of responses, from cranky puzzlement to slack-jawed astonishment to thumbs-up joy. I think my favorite guy during the traffic jam was a trucker who whipped out his cell phone with much excitement. I wondered if he was calling other nearby truckers to tell them about us? With the big spiral on the roof, I bet the car looks pretty good from that vantage.

The Dinwiddie traffic jam put us so far behind schedule that we ended up hitting DC right at rush hour. By this point I was already pretty fried, so driving in hideous rush hour traffic was really not what I wanted to be doing! But we made it through without incident, and arrived in Columbia around 6:30.

We had arranged to stay at Alix's house, but they ended up having to put their house on the market. Apparently the real estate market in Columbia is booming, because they ended up selling the house after only a couple of days! Alix's family is staying with her sister while they look for a new house (which she ended up finding while we were there), so she found a hotel for the three of us to stay in for the weekend.

It's called the Staybridge Inn, and I have to say it was a really nice place. It seemed to be geared towards longer, family trips. We stayed in a suite with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room and decent kitchenette. The room was nice and the price was reasonable. It had TVs in the living room and both bedrooms, and even had a VCR in the living room!

When we got there Alix had checked in already, and had plentiful snacks ready and waiting. What a godsend! Because of all the traffic we hadn't stopped to eat lunch, so we were tired, cranky and hungry. Being able to stretch out on the couch, have a soda and eat a mountain of cheese and crackers was just what I needed.

After the snacks we chilled for a while, so Alix could make some phone calls regarding her new house. I went out and did a little more work on my car. Not a whole lot -- I was just too tired -- but I had just scraped off a soft plastic toy that had melted, and I wanted to put down some more beads to cover the gunky residue. After that we went to an excellent pan-Asian restaurant for dinner, where they treated us quite well despite our grungy, travel-worn appearance, drove by Alix's new house (which looked cute though hard to see in the dark), and then called it a night.

Okay, that's Friday's events.