Ten hours to nowhere
Left home at noon yesterday - headed to Ellensburg to see my father. Pass reports were traction tires required. Traffic sucked and about milepost 47 on I-90 there was a sign saying that chains were required for non all-wheel-drive vehicles, which was us. Pulled over and with some difficulty got them on. Our Scion doesn’t have a lot of spare room in the front wheel well.
Finally got going and went maybe a couple of hundred yards before the state patrol shut down traffic about a quarter mile in front of us. The very useful traffic radio told us that there were accidents on the west coast of the summit of Snoqualmie pass. This was about 2 pm. We waited an hour and a half, and decided to go home at least in part because I didn’t want to deal with getting the chains off in the dark. We were just to the east of a freeway exit and I talked the truck beside us into moving forward a bit so I could back out onto the shoulder and get to the exit. We went over the overpass and headed west. We stopped to take off our chains by which time traffic was moving again to the east. Perhaps we should have waited. We missed a prime rib dinner.
Going home was good in a slow sort of way until we hit Mercer Island, where it got slower, but still acceptable. Traffic stopped at the I-90 - I-5 intersection. This was about 4:30. About an hour later we bagged trying to get onto I-5 and took the James street exit. Went uphill, and with a great deal of difficulty made it to Boren where I decided heading downhill might be a better tactic. This was OK until traffic stopped moving again, and given the steepness of the hill approaching, made it seem likely that traffic wasn’t going to move for a while. We jogged up hill on Marion, eventually over to Maidson, and finally onto Broadway. Traffic soon stopped, and again we jogged at Union then to 11th, passing about two blocks away from the location of these exciting driving scenes, Eventually headed up to 12th back down to Broadway, then Roanoke and then onto the freeway which was moving at about 20 mph.
We moved until we got to 45th and then stopped and started going about 10 blocks an hour, getting to 55th at 8:15 pm. We continued like this until a bit past the Lake City exit where the multi-car accident had just been moved to the shoulder and we had a relatively car free freeway, and could travel an amazing 30-40 mph the last couple of miles to 175th 145th. We arrived home at about 10:10.
Total driving time 10 hrs
Miles travelled 101.2 not counting detours on Capitol Hill
Average Speed 10 mph - My wife doesn’t believe we went that fast.
Food/drink consumed: none
Rest stops: none
We were much relieved to get home
Originally published at my other blog: You might think that... You can comment here or there.