Now It's My Turn. I'm Thinking of Something Dark and Mysterious. It's a Fish We Don't Know. If We Ask it Directions, It Could Ingest Us and Spit Out Our Bones. What is it With Men and Asking for Directions?

Rissy's itinerary said she would arrive Monday afternoon. Sunday after church I got an email from her that her flight had been delayed a few hours, but she was finally boarding the plane. I puzzled over this email. How long was the flight again? Ten hours? Sixteen hours? Either way, it puts her in way before Monday afternoon. Was there something about the time change I was miscalculating?

I emailed her back and told her to call me the second her plane landed, just to make sure I was there. That night, just as I changed into my pajamas and crawled into bed with a book the phone rang; her plane had just landed! A whole day early! As it turns out, her itinerary was simply wrong about the time change.

I jumped in the car and drove the two hours to the airport. I was only fifteen minutes away when traffic on the freeway came to a stop; A traffic jam.  At ten at night. What were all these people doing??  It didn't last too long and soon I had found Rissy and was loading bags into my car and heading home. Hooray! Rissy was here!

Another traffic jam. This one much worse. Apparently they had decided to close down a freeway. An hour later we were finally taking the exit ramp and following the detour signs. As I drove we talked. And talked and talked. An hour later, I started getting impatient  Wasn't this road we were turning on have the same name as the ramp we exited from? Doesn't this street look familiar? Ok, I KNOW I've seen that Dell Taco before. Apparently the detour signs had taken us in one giant, hour-long circle.

So we did some creative navigating and fifteen minutes later were back on the freeway headed home. Rissy is a brilliant navigator.

Sadly, the traffic nightmares did not stop there. Tuesday night, on the way to the ward Halloween Party, traffic wasn't moving. A trip that usually takes twenty minutes took us forty. We arrived at the party ten minutes before it ended, and no one got to see the costumes I had worked so hard on.

Thursday we celebrated Rissy's birthday and went to get an ice-cream cake. The freeways were stopped in both directions, so we took the side roads. Sadly, they weren't moving either. We gave up and turned around five miles from our house. Alas, it took us forty-five minutes to drive that five mile span. And that was on side streets!

The good news is that it gave Rissy and I A LOT of time to talk. The bad news is I'm sure she thinks Sunnland has horrible traffic all the time. I've not really had problems before, but after this week, I just might agree with her.

She is driving back home now. I hope traffic is much better for her all the way home.