Posts Tagged ‘traffic’

Earlier this month we visited Chris & Cara in Warrington. The darkness, rain and fog literally put a dampener on the journey. Between the weather and the traffic it took us two hours to get there. More and more it seems difficult to get anywhere without allowing for significant margins due to the traffic. Coming home was much improved though, making the journey in less than an hour and a half.

One of the advantages of Warrington is that even with the apartment blocks right in the centre you can find parking. They also have a Toby Carvery, so what more could you want in a town? Dinner was excellent, as was the company. Well worth the trip.

Earlier this month, I was invited to a wedding reception over in York. Due to the medication I’m on, I can’t drink, so I figured the most convenient thing to do was drive over. I didn’t want to arrive dead on 7:30 in case nobody else turned up at that time, so I decided to set off at 7:15, allowing 45 minutes to drive there, get parked and find the venue, thereby arriving a fashionable 30 minutes after the start time.

So I set off at 7:15 and got as far as the roundabout by the big Tesco when I ran into road works which had closed off the A64 entirely, so I followed a badly sign posted diversion route which took me up to Weatherby Road.

They seemed to disappear at this point so I kept driving as far as village which I believe was called Cottingham, at which point my sat nav finally provided me a route which was something other than make a U-turn and head back to the A64.

This involved joining the A1, and heading back down the motorway towards Leeds until I got back to the A1/A64 junction. By now I was massively behind schedule but I thought hey ho, at least I’m now on a dual carriageway all the way to York.

So I carried on down the A64, and suddenly saw a bunch of cars with their hazard lights on ahead of me. Next thing I know both lanes have come to a standstill and I can see some flashing emergency lights up ahead of me.

Apparently someone had been run over.

After being sat there for a while with an increasing feeling that I was going to be trapped on the A64 all night, the traffic eventually started to move again as a police officer started directing cars to take it in turns to make a U-turn and drive the wrong way down an on-ramp to the A64 which lead us into a village that was either near, or was, Weatherby.

By this point I had been on the road for almost two hours and didn’t really know what roads there were into York without the A64, so I just gave it up as a bad job and gave up. That meant that not only had I missed my friend’s wedding reception, but I was also now forced to buy dinner from McDonald’s because I had missed out on the buffet. Is there some kind of compensation fund I can claim that back from?

15 minute commute to work!

With schools out for the holidays and a lot of people having finished work last Friday too the roads are a dream to drive on. My commute to work normally takes almost twice as long, I could live with this all year.

The central locking is finally working again on my car!

It has been a bit of a mission though. I got a phone call from Evans Halshaw to inform me that the part that had been on order was finally in so I booked it in for a service to take place this morning. Phoned my dad up to see if he could give me a lift to work once I’d booked it in.

Turns out, he had his car booked in for a service at the same time.

I mean seriously, what are the odds? Let’s assume that the car goes in twice a year, that means his car is going in once every 150 days meaning that the probability is like 1%. Still, we worked in some kind of plan as he was picking up a curtesy car.

I was 15 minutes late down there because a lane of the inner ring road was closed off and there was an accident down near Hunslet road combining to some rather large queues. Then we had to navigate our way back to Evans Halshaw Nissan to drop my dad’s car in and finally get me to work. By the time I got to work I felt like I’d done a days work :P.