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abbreviated trip report
I can now testify that it takes fifteen hours to drive from Orlando to DC, at an average speed of about 75 mph. (Often as high as 85 or 90, but also a total of about an hour and a half -- at various points in two or three states -- at about 15 or 20.)
I'm simultaneously wired and exhausted, which is not surprising, and is even less surprising in light of the following -- which is the largely unedited text of the e-mail I just sent my folks. I'll catch y'all later.
Meant to call when I got home, but it was quite late, so I didn't want to wake anybody and keep them from getting to work in the morning. But the drive was -- for the most part -- uneventful, and smooth except for a couple of relatively brief traffic snarls, and we got back entirely safely.
The big Event, of course, happened at the very beginning of the trip. Had we left only a few minutes earlier, we might very well have seen this actually happen, or god forbid been caught in it ourselves (though the debris was falling mainly on the westbound lanes, apparently, and we were heading east), and had we left only a few minutes later, we'd have been stuck in the traffic when they closed the freeway and had to try to find another way out of Orlando -- or gone back and stayed with L. for another night, though that doesn't seem so likely. As it was, we were unimpeded but quite freaked out -- I'm more so now, of course, now that I have nothing else to concentrate on and the three-minute sequence "Wow, that's a lot of smoke; it seems to be concentrated, rather than an out-of-control brush fire thing; oooh, no, it's an accident; wow, it's a big accident; guys, that's not a car burning, it's the whole overpass; no stopping distance, no place to pull over, the shoulders are crowded, only a few of these cars are damaged and the rest are here to help and they must have already called the thing in so the only thing is to keep going HOT HOT HOT that's crumbled concrete under the tires Okay, here comes a fire truck" keeps replaying in my head.
So I'm going to go to bed. But here's a link to the news story, and the note I sent to the girls along with the link a minute ago. (There was so much smoke that we couldn't tell if anything other than the overpass was on fire, and certainly not that there weren't any other vehicles up there except the crashed tanker. Until L. called us around noon, when the local news had spent its first ten minutes on the story, we didn't know that the casualties were -- relatively speaking -- so light. It wasn't a happy morning.)
--
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/orl-crash081102.story
(But what's this "At first, people were driving by like this was a normal thing"? Can the fireman read the minds of the people driving the cars? Does he know that the little one with Virginia plates is thinking "Oh, look, a tanker must have hit the railing, ho hum, better get back to Our Nation's Capital," and not "HOLY SHIT, the overpass is ON FIRE, there's no place to stop and nothing we can do and these guys have called 911 and we're doing at least 70 and the only thing is to KEEP DRIVING and not stick around here and get in the way, and make things worse, so we're going UNDER THE BURNING OVERPASS and CHRIST just the breeze is like opening an oven, okay, safely through, nothing we could do if we stopped, what happened, what happened, what happened"? I'm inclined to doubt it.)
(Incidentally, look at the pictures -- the place where we crossed is a good ways behind where the truck was. So what was burning back there was the runoff fuel, not even the main concentration of the stuff.)
--
I'm simultaneously wired and exhausted, which is not surprising, and is even less surprising in light of the following -- which is the largely unedited text of the e-mail I just sent my folks. I'll catch y'all later.
Meant to call when I got home, but it was quite late, so I didn't want to wake anybody and keep them from getting to work in the morning. But the drive was -- for the most part -- uneventful, and smooth except for a couple of relatively brief traffic snarls, and we got back entirely safely.
The big Event, of course, happened at the very beginning of the trip. Had we left only a few minutes earlier, we might very well have seen this actually happen, or god forbid been caught in it ourselves (though the debris was falling mainly on the westbound lanes, apparently, and we were heading east), and had we left only a few minutes later, we'd have been stuck in the traffic when they closed the freeway and had to try to find another way out of Orlando -- or gone back and stayed with L. for another night, though that doesn't seem so likely. As it was, we were unimpeded but quite freaked out -- I'm more so now, of course, now that I have nothing else to concentrate on and the three-minute sequence "Wow, that's a lot of smoke; it seems to be concentrated, rather than an out-of-control brush fire thing; oooh, no, it's an accident; wow, it's a big accident; guys, that's not a car burning, it's the whole overpass; no stopping distance, no place to pull over, the shoulders are crowded, only a few of these cars are damaged and the rest are here to help and they must have already called the thing in so the only thing is to keep going HOT HOT HOT that's crumbled concrete under the tires Okay, here comes a fire truck" keeps replaying in my head.
So I'm going to go to bed. But here's a link to the news story, and the note I sent to the girls along with the link a minute ago. (There was so much smoke that we couldn't tell if anything other than the overpass was on fire, and certainly not that there weren't any other vehicles up there except the crashed tanker. Until L. called us around noon, when the local news had spent its first ten minutes on the story, we didn't know that the casualties were -- relatively speaking -- so light. It wasn't a happy morning.)
--
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/orl-crash081102.story
(But what's this "At first, people were driving by like this was a normal thing"? Can the fireman read the minds of the people driving the cars? Does he know that the little one with Virginia plates is thinking "Oh, look, a tanker must have hit the railing, ho hum, better get back to Our Nation's Capital," and not "HOLY SHIT, the overpass is ON FIRE, there's no place to stop and nothing we can do and these guys have called 911 and we're doing at least 70 and the only thing is to KEEP DRIVING and not stick around here and get in the way, and make things worse, so we're going UNDER THE BURNING OVERPASS and CHRIST just the breeze is like opening an oven, okay, safely through, nothing we could do if we stopped, what happened, what happened, what happened"? I'm inclined to doubt it.)
(Incidentally, look at the pictures -- the place where we crossed is a good ways behind where the truck was. So what was burning back there was the runoff fuel, not even the main concentration of the stuff.)
--
no subject
That kind of excitement we can all do without.