Ulog 16: I-95 South

Wow! I-95 South was something to behold. I’ve been reading about how many people has mentioned for me to avoid it at all cost and I didn’t listen. I tried to compensate by giving it extra time. I even reasoned with myself that it was a Friday summer afternoon and there would not be as much people on the road. I even thought that I would try to go after the morning traffic or the afternoon work traffic that I wouldn’t be affected. Boy, was I wrong!

Google Map stated that the trip would take about 6 hours. Door to door, it was more like 11 hours. True, we did stop for dinner somewhere before Richmond for about an hour and a half. So if you knock that out it was still 9.5 hours of driving.

We started at 12pm today from outside of West Chester, PA. After we picked up my wife from work and ordered fast food from McDonalds, we started out journey. It was smooth sailing until we got to the Beltway between Baltimore and Richmond. We were on the Express EzPass lane and it was still crawling at time. Some sections of that Interstate has at least 7 lanes going in one direction. So obvious, it’s capable of holding lots of cars on the road. Yet it remained congested.

So for that 30 miles stretch of highway, it was bumpers to bumpers at time. Fortunately for us, we have 5 people in the car so I was able to use the HOV (3+) lane. And I was still that delayed. I don’t want to imagine some single guy going down that road.

So while the car trip was quite unpleasant for that part, I did find that people down South are so much friendlier. I’ve heard of “Southern Hospitality”. I could feel while driving. There weren’t that many Honkings even though we were bumpers to bumpers in many stretches. People seemed okay just to move along. Because there were many lanes down here, I think that there were even more cars here than the NYC area traffic. So that spoke even more volume to the theory. I heard a few honkings here and there. In NYC, it was constant regardless of whether there was a congestion or not. People just wanted to honk.

I finally arrived at Fayetteville. My brother and his family got here before I did. The hotel was in my name so I had to call them up to let them let my brother checked in. They were cool about it and there was no problem. Some hotels won’t let anyone check in except the person on reservation. Actually, let me restate that. Most hotels don’t let you checkin if you’re not on the reservation.

So now here I am typing this. I hope to get up early enough so that we can start fresh again. I’ve got some tasks to take care of in the morning. They include running to the local supermarket to get fresh produce and meat so that my wife can cook and grind up food for the younger daughter. If it was up to me, I would just let her eat canned food. But I am not in charge of the baby nutritional aspect so I will just do as I am told. That way I won’t get into trouble with the wife.

Wife told me to take almost all of the luggages into the room so I will have to carry them out tomorrow. Urgh.

Other than that, good night and don’t let the bedbugs bite!