Traffic!!!

Can I just scream??? I guess I could, but luckily I had company with me and we tried to laugh it off. It has a little hard to do because I was so hungry that I was lightheaded driving a rental car and my dear friend was pregnant and carsick. Not a good combination to get stuck in traffic for nearly 3 hours.

Here's the story; Crystal and I decided that we'd like to go hiking. I had to register Ariel for school down in York, so we chose to go there to hike. I left Nathaniel here at the house with Romona, as he hadn't slept well the night before and it was a bit wet and chilly out and I knew he'd never last. So, Crystal brought her dog instead to join us.

No problems so far. Well, we had a nice time chatting and hiking and snacking and it go to be 3ish, which every good commuter knows it's time to hit the highway before evening traffic kicks in (especially being Friday). So, off we went. As we passed the Newberrytown exit heading North, I thought that perhaps I should take the back way thru the country and avoid the town traffic. But I chose otherwise, assuming that I could get back to the parking lot where Crystal left her car faster on the highway. Well, we didn't get much further for a bit past Yocumtown exit, when we saw the cars slowing down. Within a minute, we were inching along. We tuned into the emergency station to hear what was going on. They had closed HWY 83 Northbound AND 581 E- both of which we needed to use. And there was at least 5-8 miles of traffic ahead of us that was trying to get the same direction we were going. Grrrrr....

At this point, I promptly got off the next exit, at Lewisberry and went back to where we would have been had I gotten off the highway 2 exits before, but I would've missed a whole lot of traffic! We crept along for 2 hours before we got to Crystal's car, which normally would have taken 20 minutes from where we were.

So, what caused the closure? People want someone to blame! Well, there seems to have been crazed people driving around shooting at the police and they were having a grand chase along the highway! I don't know what the outcome to the chase was, but there were MANY angry people because of it, including Dustan (who would've guessed?).

He seemed to have missed the bulk of trouble from the closure, but it also seems that he was a testimony to God's grace this same hour. He was coming home down the back way, and apparently, a garbage truck was driving the opposite direction, too fast, and as the truck came over a hill, he jumped it and ran the thing off the road, into a tree. This knocked the tree over into the road, hitting 3 cars passing by the same time. Right in front of Dustan.

So, his civil duty came into action here, and he started guiding traffic after calling it in. And here he was for quite a while.

It was a crazy afternoon, the result of which was hungry bellies and thankfulness that nothing worse had befallen us today.