Happy Wednesday!
Since Tammy has been schlogging back and forth by herself this week I thought we'd share some of the fun she's been having as well as some of her favorite commute experiences.
Tammy and I couldn't be different behind the wheel. What causes me to roar and yell colorful phrases, merely appears on Tammy as a comment and more often as simply a heavy sigh. Now, don't get me wrong, Tammy is every bit as frustrated as I am, she just has a minimalist's approach when letting it surface.
The first item that I thought we should discuss is something Tammy terms "The 1000 Mile Road". Running from Purdy down the length of the Key Peninsula is a 2 lane stretch of madness called Key Peninsula Highway, KPH for short. For a good distance down this road this is a state road called SR302. The speed limit range runs from 50 MPH along the state route, 45 MPH when it becomes a county road, and 35-30 MPH through the little towns and hamlets along the way.
This is a great time for a short intermission. Along KPH not far from where we live is a little "town" called Home. Nope, this isn't a bad attempt at Leave It To Beaver style humor (well ok, maybe it was for the folks who named it) the place is really called Home. It's a quaint little place full of quaint folks doing quaint things. More than once I've been at the gas station in home and seen deer grazing on the lawn next to it. If you ever happen through this little spot, stop and see Claude and Claudette at the Trillium Creek Winery. Keep an eye on Claude during your tasting though; he has a heavy hand when he pours. Oh, and I got a terrific $175 ticket for speeding here which taught me to be a devotee to keeping a light foot in this 35 zone. So, please, stop tailgating me through Home, and passing me might not be the best choice either.
So, how did KPH earn it's less than flattering name. I should start by saying that it's not really 1000 miles long, only about 18 or so. The name comes from the behavior of the motorists on it. Imagine you have spent the last 2 hours fighting for your life in the Miramar like battle that is I-5 ("I'm too close for missiles Goose, I'm switching to guns"). You are now in the cute, sweet green, pine tree lined road that takes you home. "Just 18 miles more, that's all, really just 25 minutes, then I'm feet up and ready for the stress to drain". Hah! Nice try. So, here's the downside of living in the area we do. There are just some folks out here, mainly driving 1977 Datsun pickups loaded with the entire scrap remnants of an aluminum travel trailer, that can't seem to drive faster than 25 MPH. I get it, I really do. Either their vehicle doesn't go faster than that, or they don't have the hand-eye coordination to safely do the posted limit. Heck, maybe they just aren't in a big enough hurry to go any faster. All valid reason to travel slowly and I don't begrudge them that. Just one simple request, please, for the love of all that's good and right, when you see cars behind you that do want to drive the speed limit, pull over and let them by.
There is a small silver lining of course to spending time behind one of these folks on the road and that's when they turn off before you do. There have been several times this has earned an audible expression of relief/joy from everyone in the car.
We've talked a bunch about merge related behavior recently so this is a good time to show you Tammy's favorite merge. Forgive the image, she took it with one hand while gripping the steering wheel hard enough to turn coal to diamond. Out along SR16 is an interchange called Burley/Olalla. This interchange used to have traffic merging from the side streets in the T intersection from Hell. The WDOT did a fine job of rebuilding the interchange into a functional standard freeway style set of ramps. To do this they had to completely close this interchange for more than a year (I think). This pushed the traffic back to the exit at Purdy which is, umm, our exit.
The exit to Purdy is already overloaded. We recently had a new Hospital built in the area and a ton of folks live on this little tonsil called The Key Peninsula and it's a popular route to places like Shelton. With the added traffic, it wasn't long before the line started backing up onto the freeway.
Let me take a moment to talk about freeway shoulders. Shoulders are there to allow motorists a place to remove themselves from traffic when they have equipment problems or similar situations that force them to stop their vehicle. Because of the purpose of this area, the shoulders collect all the freeway garbage like nails, glass, and lots of other things that are not good for your car. This is also the place where the road has its edge and if you've ever seen the edge of asphalt, you'll notice that as it wears it begins to degrade in this location. The bottom line here is it's neither smart, nor safe and unless posted that's it' allowed, it's illegal to drive on the shoulder.
People's first response to this extra traffic spilling over onto SR16 was to begin queuing on the shoulder. On the surface, this seems like a polite thing to do but unfortunately they didn't consider the paragraph above nor did they think about the fact that the previous onramp was on a few hundred yards away. Soon the queue backed up all the way to the previous onramp leaving anyone who else who needs to exit no choice but to stop in the lane of travel and wait, or try and jam themselves up at the head of the line! To solve this mess, the WDOT came along and re-engineered the exit creating a merge farther down the off ramp so that cars could use both the lane and the shoulder to line up in from 3-6 PM. I'm not even going to get anywhere near the weirdness that occurs around the time limitation in place, I'll leave it to you to consider the implications there.
Now, low and behold, the work at the Burley/Olalla interchange is complete! It's wonderful out there. They did a fine job. They have yet though to undo their re-engineering at our Purdy ramp. The original exit appears to be able to deal with the volume (barely) but some people just can't resist seeing that wide open shoulder and zipping past the cars in the lane. I'm happy to discount the folks that seldom take this exit and it doesn't occur to them that the people in the left lane are lined up for a reason. Unfortunately, what you get are Zoomers doing 40-50 MPH down that shoulder and slamming themselves in at the last moment. As soon as you clear the merge caused by Zoomer, the jam breaks and everyone moves on down to the next conundrum, The Purdy Spit. I'll leave that for another day.
Tammy asked me to leave you today with these words of wisdom – "Take it as a sign, if you get passed by a School Bus on the freeway, you're going too slow."
Don't drive angry! Drive weird!
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