Necroooooooooooooooooooooo...
So, right now, I'm home, visiting my mom again, a kind of vacation before my job resumes on November 2. Probably no one cares but I'm going to write this stuff down anyway.
My trip home is generally about 485 km (300 miles), and depending on how fast I drive, it usually takes 4.5 to 5.5 hours. The eastern half of the route is "non-negotiable", taking the A4 west through Thuringia and eastern Hesse, to a point close to a city named Gießen. There, I can either continue roughly west along a country road to a town called Limburg, where I hit the big A3 northwest to Cologne, though I myself turn off toward Koblenz in the Rhine valley, and then through the Eifel mountains (north of the Moselle river) to Trier. The alternate route is to go southwest past Gießen to Frankfurt, then on to Wiesbaden, Mainz, and into the Hunsrück mountains (south of the Moselle). The two routes are almost exactly the same length, and each contains a stretch of country road where you need to drive more slowly. I normally take the first route to Trier, and the other one back, just to have some variability. But since my last return trips would have brought me into the Frankfurt area in the late afternoon, I always used route A, both ways. And generally, no matter where I travel, I get through without incident; the traffic jams and accidents are almost always on the other side.
This return home was NOT without incident, nooolee! This time, since it was Sunday, I decided to take the Frankfurt route west, the "rarest" trip for me. I left - about 15 minutes later than I had planned to - at 2:45 P.M. I had called my mom, saying to expect me between 8:00 and 8:30 P.M. Giving me an easy 5.5 hours, drive 100 km/h, save some gas. Time for supper.
Everything went fine until I reached a place called Bad Hersfeld, where there's a big Amazon warehouse. I was opening a bottle of drink between my legs when it slipped out of my hands, the cap sliding over my leg and down next to the seat. I barely managed to grab the bottle's neck between my ring finger and pinky, somewhat painful, actually, and some of my ice tea spilled on my t-shirt. Not much, luckily. This was all rather annoying since I was just on the passing lane and losing speed! But I got the bottle up, managed to reach into the back for an empty one, exchanged caps... A bit later, I managed to find the cap next to my seat - only to push it even further in! It's still there now, hidden treasure...
If that had been the whole of my "adventures", I'd not be writing this. Not too long afterward, though, approaching a big Autobahn crossing point called the Kirchheimer Dreieck, I suddenly landed in a traffic jam. Stop-and-go traffic. It went on and on and on. Two police cars passed, I thought there must be an accident up ahead, but I never saw anything. It's just that the Autobahn is three lanes here, then goes down to two, and in the triangle, down to one lane for a short bit before merging with another Autobahn. It seems it was just the traffic volume. Where the hell so much traffic came from on a Sunday, I do not know. The joined Autobahns go on for a few miles to yet another splitting point, the Hattenbacher Dreieck, where they go their separate ways again. This is a long climb up a hill, and on top there's a construction site, though no lanes are closed, they just get less wide. In the middle of the construction site, the backup just magically disappeared, suddenly everyone was up to 80 again and there was loads of road between the cars.
I stopped at a rest station shortly afterward to tell my mom I'd be late - and decided to drop the driving 100, so as to be able to catch up.
But no! Near Gießen, I stay on the Autobahn, and just 10 minutes later, at yet another triangle (Gambacher Dreieck), the next traffic jam. There were lots of cars coming from the other Autobahn, the access ramp was also clogged. Okay, I get it, they need to merge... But the traffic jam just continued! Three lanes, and it was nothing but stop, go a bit, stop again, go... I felt I could have walked faster, it took 30 minutes just to go a few klicks. Then, another construction site comes up. The culprit? Well, not really! It stays three lanes, again, the width is somewhat reduced, there's a speed limit of 100 (which is quite fast in a construction site, usually it's 80 or 60) - and right after entering the construction,
everything speeds up and the traffic jam melts away. Like magic. Bad magic!
While there's a lot of traffic around Frankfurt, it flows smoothly. On to Wiesbaden - and there, not too far from the city and the horrible dilapidated bridge where you cross the Rhine (Schiersteiner Brücke, they've been renovating it since forever...), there's a sign stating that the Autobahn is closed off due to construction. Oh, HELL! I get rerouted back south again, back on to the Autobahn I had already been on! And then across another bridge, now to the south of Mainz instead of to the north, then west past that city (Mainz and Wiesbaden form a kind of double city on the two sides of the Rhine; amusingly, Mainz is the state capital of Rhineland-Palatinate, Wiesbaden [and not Frankfurt!] the state capital of Hesse), where I land in another short-lived traffic backup... Thank you for the 20 km detour!!
After passing Mainz, at least, it was smooth sailing, but I did not get home until nearly 9:30 P.M., after a friggin' 6.5 hour trip!
One thing is sure, it was not boring!! (Oh, and of course, my mom had eaten without me...)
