Driving in the slow lane

We had an appointment to attend in City Beach this morning at 11am.  It takes about 35-40 minutes to reach there most of the time but we left quite a bit earlier than that. The last appointment we were late due to a behavior problem so I didn’t want to a repeat. Apparently, it wasn’t meant to be.

The mishap occurred when I thought I left my iPod at home. So I turned around and came home to discover I was mistaken because I had put it into my purse. So we started out again, stopping to get cash from the atm, then starting our real travel. We were still well ahead on time at this point. We were delayed at the major intersection where we turn onto the highway by massive numbers of trucks and cars. It’s an industrial area so this is common at peak times but it’s usually quite clear at 10:15. We had to wait through three lights before we were able to turn.

We managed to travel another few minutes with no problems but I got stuck behind a double tanker milk truck at the traffic lights. It took ages for it to get going and traffic was heavy everywhere, making it impossible to move into the right lane to pass. We finally got up to speed just before reaching the next traffic light. Phew…

Another five minutes up the road, the highway crosses over the freeway and narrows to two lanes. This time I was lucky enough to get behind a crane, going just about as slowly as the tanker. There was no way around this one until the highway returned to four lanes and we had nearly reached the road where we needed to turn.

So all was fine going down the coastal highway until we reached City Beach. They’ve been doing roadworks there for months but I’ve never had any delays getting through. It was my lucky day because traffic had bottlenecked for about a kilometer or so back and we were delayed a good ten minutes. Until this mess, we were still on track to arrive on time. But we arrived a good ten minutes late. Sigh.

We were also delayed on the return trip, mostly because I had the great idea of trying to go around but got stuck anyway. It was still related to the original roadworks. Fortunately we don’t have to go back that way until February.