Cars and Trucks and Things That Go

Maybe it was a subconscious awareness that I only had to report to work for one day before being granted a two-day weekend reprieve, but somehow my body was able to roust out of bed this morning after only a couple of alarm snoozes. I got on the road slightly later than usual, but since I figured some people would be writing off the final day of the workweek and others would be home with kids enjoying a fifth day of cancelled school, I expected the traffic wouldn’t be too heinous.

And it wasn’t. Of course, I was a good stretch down the highway before I heard the radio report that the above-ground stations on the Orange Line were still closed by the snow. At that point my options were to turn around and head to the VRE station near home, drive all the way in to work, or drive to one of the underground Metro stops. I immediately ruled out turning around, and parking was an approximately equal concern for either of the other two options. (The nice thing about the above-ground Metro stations is that they have big above-ground parking lots, whereas the underground ones tend to be in more urban foot-traffic-friendly neighborhoods.) The deciding factors ended up being twofold: the farther east I drove, the greater the chance of getting ticketed for violation the morning rush hour HOV-only rule for 66. Also, my wife heard the same radio report, called me, and after a quick internet check told me the westernmost open Metro station was right off 66, which sounded like more of a sure thing than my vague notion of how to drive to my office. So I followed the Metro signs off 66 at the appropriate exit.

Or such was my intention, but after one Metro sign on the highway and one at the end of the exit ramp, indicators of the stations location (or very existence) dried right up. I drove straight for a while looking for signs, or the station itself, or anything I recognized, and then decided I was not heading anywhere helpful and turned around. Going in the reverse direction, I was then stuck in some pretty heavy traffic, complicated by the random narrowing of lanes due to giant snowbanks on the shoulder, so I turned off onto a different road which looked fairly major and thus likely to go someplace significant. And after dodging people literally standing in the street because the bus kiosk was full of snow, and being blinded by driving directly into the rising sun (I’m usually well ahead of sunrise on my commute) I finally ended up in Alexandria. Which was not exactly my ideal destination.

Another phone call from my wife and another map-googling and another couple of u-turns later I was finally on a path that would lead directly to my office. Took me a little over two hours, but I made it to work and got a spot at a nearby parking garage, which again I attribute to a severe decrease in the total number of people bothering to make the commute today. And now that my overwhelming urge to commit vehicular manslaughter has abated somewhat, I’m optimistic that the drive home will be much easier than the morning debacle.

Still, it’s probably just as well that I’ll put in close to a full day at the office, head homeward, gather up the little guy from daycare and then start him on the slow march toward bedtime. The past few days have been great for parent/child bonding but said bonding has frequently taken the form of reading and re-reading the Richard Scarry classic whose name has been appropriated for this post’s title. 70 or so pages of about nine zillion whimsical modes of transportation on the go. It’s the boy’s new favorite book in the world, and he is unflaggingly devoted to it, and to be fair it is fun to flip through and the owl dressed as a witch and riding a broom-o-cycle is a few different kinds of awesome, but … After my own zany automotive misadventure I’ll be happy if I can get through tonight with a couple of cribside readings involving only cowboys or monkeys or counting of things that have zero wheels. It’s important to have goals.