Traffic Nightmare : Mass Pike

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Live Strong
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On Friday afternoon, I traveled to my girlfriend Mallory's house , a trip that should normally take me 2 and 1/2 hours. This afternoon it took me 8 hours ... yes 8 FREAKIN' HOURS !

I get a call from Mallory on my cell around 2:30 pm , as I am just barely getting on the highway ( E-84 in Newtown ) , telling me that the Mass Pike is closed, which is the second part of highway I need to travel on to get to her house.

As I hit Waterbury and Hartford, there was a ton of traffic, then it cleared. It then rained and hailed around the CT boarder ... o that was fun ! I was doing 75 mph and all of the sudden hail everywhere. The worst was then traffic built again all the way to the Mass Pike intersection in Sturbridge Mass. Traffic was so bad, people began to turn their cars off, step out side and walk around the highway just to stretch. This went on for an hour or more... until I began to crawl to the toll booth for the Mass pike. As I sit towards the mass pike, people began merging for which direction they were going, east or west. I was going east towards Boston. As I merged east I found just as much if not worse traffic on the Mass Pike itself. Again we inched at 4-5 mph for an hour straight, while all I needed to go was travel 20 miles. It took another 2 hours to travel those 20 miles.

As I inched down the Mass Pike, I saw people pulled over walking their dogs, peeing on the side of the highway ( humans and dogs alike) and cars that have their hazards on because they ran out of gas. It was crazy. Again I got out of my car, and walked around as did many others. State Police didn't seem to take notice or care as none of us were moving anytime soon.I met people from NJ,CT and NY as they had their cars next to mine in the lane over. I got sick of waiting for dinner and I had gotten very hungry, so I went into the emergency lane and I pulled into a McDonald for nourishment at the rest area, only to take another 30 minutes to get merge into traffic once I was done.

I eventually made it through the traffic with a total travel time of 8 hours or so. How ever Mallory is more then worth all of the hassle !