Worst driving day, ever

As the title says, yesterday was an absolutely miserable day of driving.  Sure I have had longer days of driving like those 900+ miles days across Texas but yesterday was still the worst by far.  So what made it so horrible you may ask? Traffic, almost non-stop, miserable, stop and go traffic that put our arrival in Richmond some four hours later than was predicted at the beginning of the day.

It was just crazy, you would sit through an hour of gridlock, get rolling for a few miles and run into another mess.  We hit heavy traffic in Worcester as we left, and then gridlock past NYC, the Delaware Memorial Bridge, and then all along the Baltimore, Washington area.  At one point Cindy asked a toll worker if it was always this bad.  She said Friday’s in the summer are always bad due to people trying to get to the shore on weekends.

I just can’t believe that 95 has not been expanded over the years to increase it’s capacity.  It seems like the most minor thing can throw traffic into gridlock like a vehicle by the side of the road looked at by rubber neckers.  The phantom road work closures drive me insane as well.  Lanes of traffic are closed to supposed road work yet nothing is being done.  No workers are even present, yet a lane is closed.

During the drive yesterday both Cindy and I were sort of losing our minds.  The infinite brake lights as far as you can see just creates a sense of hopelessness.  I found myself yelling at other vehicles on the road random things like “the road is full, go home!” or calling random drivers jerks, idiots or assholes for no real reason other than they were part of the quagmire that was driving me insane.  We recorded a brief video in the middle of the madness I will post later.

I had another issue to handle while Cindy was driving.  All of a sudden my phone stopped using cellular data.  I couldn’t do anything data related.  I first turned my phone off and on to see if that cleared it up.  Nope.  I then looked at my cellular data under settings and saw it was turned off and unable to be turned on.  I then jumped to the usage screen and saw the phone supposedly had used 51.5GB of DATA!  WTF???

This made no sense, other than using it as a hotspot for my laptop to write these blog entries, check my email, and FB feed a little, I did nothing else that would gobble data.  I then thought maybe it was Cindy using Netflix on the iPad while we were driving that inflated the number but even so, it would be impossible to consume that much data.

So I spent a good 20 minutes on the phone with ATT.  They confirmed that despite what my phone is showing, my data usage between the two devices was less than 7 GB.  They had no explanation for why my phone showed such a big number but they issued some sort of reset command that allowed me to once again turn on cellular data, despite the data usage number being off the charts.  I told the guy on the phone I don’t want to get some sort of monster bill this month.  He assured me I won’t and made a note in my account documenting our interaction.

So our late ETA erased our plans to get out to sight see the Richmond area on our wheels.  Instead we ordered pizza and collapsed in the room while watching Batman begins.  We stayed at an Aloft hotel, which we have stayed at before.  It’s an extremely hipster kind of place which is clean although there was ample screaming in the hallway until after 11.

After a good night’s sleep Cindy thought maybe we could ride a little this morning but one look out the window scuttled our plans once again.  It was raining steadily.  So instead we said f it, we packed up and got out on the road early to hopefully get us into Savannah Georgia at a reasonable time.  I expected the drive to be pretty clog free but I was sorely mistaken, again.  We once again hit two or three, dead stop, extended traffic jams that threw nearly an hour onto our eta.

We tacked on some more time when we stopped at South of the Border for the second time this trip for lunch.  I am crossing my fingers that my lunch, which was filled with food poisoning potential, (potato salad, coleslaw, tuna salad) stays down.  I just have a feeling that pristine food prep is not practiced at SOB.

If things go as planned we should roll into our last hotel of the trip before 6PM, hopefully giving us some time to ride and sight see a little bit.  Tomorrow I want to set an alarm and get on the road as early as possible so we can push into Naples as early as possible.  My plate at home and work is going to be quite full so I want to start chopping away at it as quickly as possible.