Traffic jam

We drove up to Northern Virginia yesterday. Anyone who has ever driven through the D.C. Metro area at least once knows that traffic up there is pretty bad. Anything,  and I mean any little thing, can turn traffic from heavy-but-moving to heavy-and-crawling.   Even worse is if you are one of those situations where traffic is stopped completely.

In the seven years we lived up there and in the subsequent nine years since we moved away, Pete and I have been lucky enough to never be in a traffic jam so bad that cars are stopped totally.

Do you know where this is going?

We drove all the way to my sister’s house in Maryland, dropped the girls off for five days, and then went on for to blitz the Mother Ship.

After we left Ikea, we got on the Beltway, which is the major ring road that encircles DC and parts of Maryland and Virginia. Traffic was heavy, but we were never stopped and, once we cross the Potomac River back into Virginia, traffic was better. We congratulated ourselves on getting through the hell that is Maryland traffic. Shortly thereafter, we got off the Beltway onto I-66 and started heading westward toward home.

Our bliss lasted approximately seven minutes. Then traffic slowed down. Then it stopped.

Then, a fire truck roared by in the emergency lane. Then, a police car going so fast that our car rocked in its wake. Then another police car and another and another. Then, the biggest ambulance we’d ever seen. Finally, not one, but TWO tow trucks.

Uh oh.

We turned off the engine to the car. We looked around and could see people getting out of their cars and walking around. We did the same.

Here’s what it looked like in front of us:

And here it is behind us:

Do you see the boy playing soccer in the road?

People were milling around and talking. Someone joked that we should set up a grill, as we could be there for a while.

The accident was being reported on the radio, so we knew it was about a mile ahead of us. Two cars were involved, some people were taking bets on what the vehicles were:  Two cars? Two SUV’s? A car and an SUV. I know, I know, it was tacky to speculate. As it turns out, it was a car and an SUV, so Pete was right, so it’s too bad he didn’t made an actual bet with the guy in the Acura with Bondo polka dots all over it.

After about 20 minutes, the ambulance came down the other side of the highway at high speed. Not long after that, one of the tow trucks passed with one of the smashed up vehicles. Five minutes after that, we could see cars ahead of us moving slowly, jockeying for position just like at Indy. A few minutes later, we were moving too. Slowly, but we were moving.  Five minutes later, we passed the accident scene and were back at full speed.

We joked that we should get t-shirts that said “I survived the big traffic accident on I-66.” If this had happened in our town, it would have been huge news. Front page on our little 6-page newspaper. However, when I clicked on the Washington Post this morning to see if there was an article, there was nothing.

Of course. It was just another day and another accident in the big city.

And now I’m off. Today, I’m driving two hours in the other direction to my hometown to see grandmothers and aunts. When I’ll get back, I’ll tell you more about our empty nest and the trip to Ikea.