It took two hours to get home last night.<\/p>\n
One of my coworkers insisted I should leave early, at five, since it was a Friday and a three-day weekend, but I was in the middle of a project I wanted to finish, which I did, and I left at 5:30.<\/p>\n
The trip home was pleasant… until I got past the Mt. Carmel Road exit, and then I ran into a traffic back-up. Traffic was moving, about five miles an hour.<\/p>\n
Now, I thought nothing of this. It’s not uncommon for traffic to back up after Mt. Carmel. There’s a long hill to climb to the Middletown Road exit, and it’s not uncommon for traffic to slow to a crawl there if there happen to be 18 wheelers in both lanes. Usually, traffic starts moving on the other side of the hill.<\/p>\n
It did not.<\/p>\n
And so, for the next six miles, my forward progress happened at something between 0 and 10 miles an hour.<\/p>\n
Traffic reports on the radio weren’t helpful. During one stopped point, I checked the Pennsylvania DOT twitter feed. “Road debris” between the Pennsylvania state line and mile marker 0.5. There was a road closure.<\/p>\n
Joy.<\/p>\n
Then my low fuel light came on.<\/p>\n
When I left the office, I had a little less than a quarter of a tank of gas. A full round trip — home to work to home — takes a little less than a quarter of a tank of gas, so this trip should have taken half of that. But sitting still, burning gas…<\/p>\n
“Please, traffic, please, start moving.”<\/p>\n
Could I make to the Sheetz at Exit 14? I was trying to do the math in my head — “My gas tank capacity is… my MPG is…” I decided I’d probably have to get off in Shrewsbury and get gas at Tom’s, which is the most expensive gas for fifty miles.<\/p>\n
There was some forward movement, but it was because people were bailing out at Exit 36. Some people were driving on the shoulder to get to Exit 36.<\/p>\n
Eventually, traffic started to move again. Slow at first, and it picked up.<\/p>\n
The problem that had closed the highway? A mudslide onto 83, just beyond the state line. An embankment overlooking the highway had collapsed in the rain.<\/p>\n
I put ten dollars — three gallons! — in the tank at Tom’s.<\/p>\n
I wasn’t angry or exasperated. It was just tedious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It took two hours to get home last night. One of my coworkers insisted I should leave early, at five, since it was a Friday and a three-day weekend, but I was in the middle of a project I wanted to finish, which I did, and I left at 5:30. The trip home was pleasant…Continue reading “Adventures in a Mudslide”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[363,4124],"class_list":["post-31499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-weather","tag-work","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}