And god cast down stones from the mountain to smite the impudent ones!
So, a little background for those who don't know... I live in Penticton and work in Kelowna... the towns are about 65 km apart along the same lake in a high-desert-valley-type environment. Well, because Vancouver is hosting the winter Olympics in 2010, the province has a bunch of cash to spend, and as part of that their doing a road-widening project to widen the only feasible route - a two-lane highway - between these two towns. There's only one problem with this: in order to widen the road, they first have to move a mountain. So they're doing blasting and closing the highway pretty frequently, but they do a good job of avoiding stopping rush hour traffic. That is, until this weekend. Apparently, the mountain isn't just some huge monolith of rock (wait... doesn't -lith mean rock? Is that redundant?) and taking large chunks of it out has created a fissure up high on the mountain [that] is several feet wide and perhaps 30 feet deep.
Given that this presents a rather severe safety hazard, the road is closed for at least several days. This is bad... very bad. It's the only way for me to get to Kelowna for work at all... the only other options are:
a) a 3-hour trip on a logging road that you'd need a 4x4 for (I don't have one) and would put me on the wrong side of town
b) a 3.5-hour mountain road with all sorts of fun slopes and deer to watch out for.
There's no way I can commute 7 hours for an 8-hour shift, and getting a hotel room would run us a minimum of $79/night... with meals, that's almost as much as I make in a day. Check out the pictures at that link above too... I don't doubt they'll expend every effort to get this thing fixed quickly, but even so I can imagine something like that taking months. Yeah, this'll be fun... maybe one of my coworkers has a room I can crash in for a while.
Given that this presents a rather severe safety hazard, the road is closed for at least several days. This is bad... very bad. It's the only way for me to get to Kelowna for work at all... the only other options are:
a) a 3-hour trip on a logging road that you'd need a 4x4 for (I don't have one) and would put me on the wrong side of town
b) a 3.5-hour mountain road with all sorts of fun slopes and deer to watch out for.
There's no way I can commute 7 hours for an 8-hour shift, and getting a hotel room would run us a minimum of $79/night... with meals, that's almost as much as I make in a day. Check out the pictures at that link above too... I don't doubt they'll expend every effort to get this thing fixed quickly, but even so I can imagine something like that taking months. Yeah, this'll be fun... maybe one of my coworkers has a room I can crash in for a while.