Thanksgiving Project – Extra Glad

What a long travel day this has been.

The trip to Tennessee was a leisurely drive of just under 9 hours. We took time to stop a couple of places and really weren’t rushed. The drive home was entirely different.

My poor father was the recipient of my mom’s insistence that we drive and drive and drive to get home. She was like that the minute the car was headed towards home. I was never like that until the last few years. Now I’m a lot like that.

So, not only was I anxious to get home…but, the trip was fraught with delays. That 9 hour trip of three days earlier, became over an 11 hour trip to get home.

Since it was a Friday, traffic was heavier. Then we sat breathing diesel fumes on I75 somewhere in Kentucky for about an hour and a half. We couldn’t see anything. We were sandwiched between semis. Finally traffic began to move. We got to the scene of the accident. A semi was facing the wrong direction. It appeared that it was coming own the hill and crossed the median, through the wire median guard rails into the other lanes of traffic and through the guard rail and down the embankment. We have no idea if there were other vehicles involved. But from the look of the cab if the truck, we were sure there were, at the very least, serious injuries.

Fast forward about an hour. We stopped again. Three lanes of traffic at a standstill. We did see a helicopter land on the highway so it must have been serious. But we were only stopped about an hour.

Fast forward until we were back in Indiana. I saw some posts on Facebook of friends who were talking about a mess on I69. But that was still more than two hours away. I was warned by several to find an alternate route home. Of course, those alternate routes would have been two lane roads. And we figured that surely everything would be gone by the time we got there. Nope. But we only crawled along for about two miles before they rerouted traffic. No problem, right? I was in familiar territory. They routed traffic east…car after car after truck after semi. I wanted out. So I went west. I knew exactly where to go. But then ‘Mr. Wonderful’ thinks he knows better than me. Now, we are both tired and cranky. You can imagine how this conversation went. I will spare you the details. And since I was actually behind the wheel, we went my way after trying his “shorter” way. We did learn that there was a six vehicle accident and two children were airlifted to the hospital. No word on their condition.

Today I’m thankful to finally be home. And praying for all involved in the aforementioned accidents.