Notes From The Road are about traveling, not necessarily what I did while I once I got out of the car!
I spent this Wednesday at a Storyteller Showcase in Connecticut. It was their very first and it was lovely. There were only a few buyers there, but they were enthusiastic and interested. I got some great nibbles and a bite, so it was definitely worth the trip. That's the perspective I've got now that I'm home. It wasn't nearly so rosy when I was in my car.
That said, it was quite the trip. I started out on Monday, going up to my mother's house in Alexandria, VA. You notice I say my mother's house as if my father does not live there, but he does...by her sufferance. That leg of the trip was easy enough as I left in good time and arrived without even needing to tell my Garmin to find me a detour around the traffic. It wasn't until I got up the next morning that things fell apart.
I left my mom's house around ten in the morning. I figured that would give everyone time to get to work before I got on the road. Things went swimmingly until I got beyond the toll tunnel in Baltimore. There were signs warning that I-95 was blocked by an accident and everyone should detour. Well, at that point I was not sure how far up the accident was, so I did what the sign said and detoured onto route 40. It took almost an hour to go twenty miles, and then I got back on 95, only to find that I had not gone far enough and the accident was still in front of me. Sighing, I got off the interstate with what was left of the traffic and spent the next three hours in Maryland going down 40, a two lane local with stoplights every five hundred feet or so. The locals must have loved that! If I lived anywhere near forty, I would have turned around and gone home. There is nothing I would have needed so badly that I would be willing to get into that traffic. Lots of locals detoured out of the mess and opted for other ways to get where they were going. The rest of us poor fools just kept following each other in slow motion bumper to bumper for miles. I didn't get out of Maryland until after three o'clock. You know what that means, right? I got into the New Jersey/New York area at 5pm.
Later I found out that a fuel tanker overturned on the highway. Nobody was hurt, but they were dealing with a huge toxic spill and possible water contamination.
Luckily, I had a short stint through New York. What I could not have anticipated was the traffic in Connecticut. I went through rush hour in four different cities before I finally got to East Hartford. I didn't arrive until almost seven thirty. Ate something, fell in bed, up by six to do a showcase.
Luckily the showcase went well. Still and all, it lasted about fifteen minutes. That's a long drive for fifteen minutes worth of performance. On the bright side, I got a gig out of it.
This morning, I planned to leave at 8:30, but woke up at 6:30 because regardless of what my brain had in mind, my body was ready to go home. I got on the road at 8am and luckily, the traffic was mostly with me. There were a few patches of nonsense, but nothing so horrible and I have my XM radio so if things get too quiet I can always cycle through seven channels without looking down from the slow traffic. Still, things were moving so well I decided to drive all the way home. I got here at 7pm. So, my trip from Alexandria to East Hartford was about as long as my trip from East Hartford back to North Carolina.
On the bright side, I finished my thoughts about a novel I hope to write someday, did some more work on my Sheherezaad(sp) piece and considered doing a two disc set of Grimm's fairytales.
Sigh.
Sometimes my life is more about traffic than it is about anything else. Oh, well. That's what I get for being a storyteller.
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