A Funny Thing Happened on the Way Home
Ok, it’s not as good as the movie “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”, but, hey, we don’t live in Roman times with Phil Silvers or Buster Keaton.
We were driving The Girlfriend (yes, The Boy has a steady girl) home last night. Usually it is just me and The Boy on this trip, but The Hubby decided to join us. We dropped off The Girlfriend at her house (about 30 minutes away from our house, by the way) and started our journey back home.
We started to talk about our plans for Sunday and general family chit-chat. Up ahead, we saw some flashing lights from emergency vehicles near the stop light on the divided highway we were on. We get to the stop light, and it is clear that something big is going on just past the curve, but we can’t see it. Soon there are other off-duty emergency personnel showing up (you know, the “regular” cars with the nice blue lights – volunteers on the ambulance corp, etc.) and the best we can do is to stay in our lane and stay out of the way.
It becomes very clear we are not going straight onward… in fact, a police car pulls up and blocks our half of the divided highway. So, we have to decide whether to turn left or right. Turning left, we are 95% sure there is no way home. Turning right, we are 90% sure there is no way home. So, considering the odds, we make the split second decision to turn right and go up the hill.
We follow some other cars up the hill who have made the same decision. But it becomes clear no one knows where to go. The car in front of us puts his blinker on for the first left, and we plan to follow. But instead of turning, he keeps going up the hill. We turn, just as The Boy points out the One Way road sign. So now we are going the wrong way on a one way street, with no idea where we will end up. Very quickly, we see the divided highway below us, with traffic coming up the one way road (in the right direction). So we pull into a driveway and turn around.
Now we have to fight our way to take a left to go back up the hill. Now there is a lot more traffic coming up the hill. We manage to squeeze in, and go up the hill a bit more.
We see several cars put their blinkers on to turn left, and not ones to find our own way, we turned left with the crowd. Quickly we saw traffic turning around in the dead end circle of that street. So, back to the hill we head.
By this time, the GPS has finally found itself and I can plug in “Home” for a destination, careful to press the “avoid freeways” option. We continue down the hill, and miraculously, we know where we are and are free to continue on our journey home.
Of course, that is not the end of the story, my friends.
As we are going down the road, we see the railroad crossing has the arms down and is making its’ merry little tune. There are only a couple of cars ahead of us, so we assume that we got there just as the arms were going down and we would see the train pass us by, and then we could continue on.
Nope.
We sat for four minutes, listening to the ringing bells, warning us of the impending train, but train was to be had. We saw someone in the oncoming lanes actually get out of his car to peer down the tracks. Now we were in the mass exodus of cars turning around to get out of that traffic. We ending up driving by the route we would have taken if our original path hadn’t been interrupted. There was no traffic coming down that road… so clearly something major must have happened.
Now, I don’t mean to imply that whatever accident happened on that road should be taken lightly. I suspect several lives were impacted with the events of the night.
But for our family, it was a night of adventure – full of little missteps and happenstance… a fond family memory.