I Don't Want to Live Where There's Too Much Traffic

Whew! Just finished cleaning the car and the truck – seemed like a good Easter Sunday day-of-rest kind of thing to do. Washed both vehicles, vacuumed, cleaned the windows, Armour-alled the interiors, and wow were they dirty; especially the car! Neither vehicle had been cleaned for a while, ‘cause it doesn’t make much sense to clean them during the rainy season; Sam has a rather pig-pen effect on the interior of the truck too, and then we drove the car to Montana for Kathleen’s dad’s funeral and back home 1,500 miles or so, eating snacks and drinking lattes all the way. Gross! (The mess I mean).

Good thing I’m one of those guys who grew up in the 60s, in what I consider the “Golden Age” of transportation so that I love my vehicles enough not to mind cleaning them (not to mention the fact I have a fetish for cleanliness).No, I don’t mind cleaning my vehicles up at all.

What I do mind is driving half way across the state of Montana, all the way across Idaho and all the way across eastern Washington on I-90 at 80 mph then having to crawl in stop-and-go traffic the last 60 miles to home because of all the danged traffic on I-5. I’ve said before that I don’t like the word hate, but I HATE driving on I-5 in Washington. The entire distance I drove on I-90 was over a two-lanes-each-way freeway and I had no trouble maintaining my speed even with all the trucks on the road. But on I-5 where there are four and five lanes each way traffic was stop and go. And the heck of it is, you hardly ever see a good reason for the slowdowns. Of course when there is a wreck or something, which there often is, traffic gets really clogged up; especially when the Barney Fife state patrol guys hold traffic up for hour after hour attempting to manufacture enough evidence to charge some driver with vehicular homicide.

I sure would like to live somewhere where I seldom ever had to drive on a freeway to ANYWHERE. I mentioned in front of my niece-in-law (is there such a thing?) the other day at dad’s funeral that I’d like to move, once Kathleen was ready to retire, to a little town where there were no stoplights and my niece-in-law suggested I move right there to Churchill, Montana (thanks Mary). That was a good suggestion because Churchill is out in the middle of Montana farmland where most of Kathleen’s family resides and is sparsely populated. It gets pretty cold in Churchill though – there was snow on the ground the day of dad’s funeral and I already live where it rains almost half the year. I don’t know if I could deal with something colder than rain.

In fact, it was raining around Snoqualmie Pass as we approached I-5, as it almost always does when we return home from Montana. That’s how we know we’re coming home. The next day I took Sam out for his afternoon walk in beautiful sunshine and before we arrived back at the house we were soaked to the bone by a sudden rain squall and ear stinging hail.

So, I don’t want to live where there’s too much traffic, where there’s too much snow or rain, where it’s not too dry (like Arizona) or anyplace too much less than perfect. Is there such a place on earth? I suppose not. I hope heaven doesn’t have freeway snarls, stoplights and cold snow and rain. I’d like to be warm when I’m gone. (Okay you wiseacres, not THAT warm!)