The Best Driver of All Time

Yep, I'm talking about me. A bunch of us were at the Mets game last night, but only three of us stayed until the last out. I was driving, and the remaining two were my passengers. So after the game we walked over to my car, which was parked outside the stadium on Roosevelt Avenue. After a couple of right turns and a left, and we found ourselves going eastbound on the Grand Central Parkway. Two exits and a drop of traffic later, we got onto the Van Wyck Expressway northbound towards the Whitestone Bridge, my route of choice on the way back to the Heights from Shea. Az we crossed the bridge ($5 toll these days) and made our way towards the Cross Bronx Expressway southbound towards the George Washington Bridge. There should be very minimal traffic along that route at 11:00 pm. Lo and behold, as we were merging onto the Cross Bronx we noticed that the cars were mamash not moving. At all. Luckily it was 10:57, az I quickly turned my radio to News Radio 880 and heard the traffic report.

Remember my fourth post? On August 17th, 2006, I wrote a post listing a couple of things that shouldn't be allowed:
"1. Closing the lower level on the George Washington Bridge and only having two lanes open on the upper roadway. Closing west 178th street between Broadway and Ft. Washington is bad too.
2. When ESPN has little league baseball and ESPN2 has women's basketball at the same time."

Well, believe it or not, last night had both of those things on steroids. On the traffic report, we were told that the entire outbound lower level of the George was closed because of a tractor-trailor accident, and one lane of the upper level was closed because of another truck accident. I politely asked my passengers to buckle their safety belts if they had not already, and proceeded to reverse the car for 100 feet or so on the shoulder and got onto the Bruckner Expressway towards the Triboro Bridge. Okay, so it wasn't the best idea in the whole world, but there were only a couple of cars behind me. The awesome thing was that a bunch of cars in front of me started following my lead. It was drive-tastic! Anyway, we took the Bruckner entry road until it merged with the main part of the highway, and we hit traffic again! The right lane of the entry road was closed too, if you can believe that. Now one thing I absolutely refused to do was pay another toll for the Triboro Bridge; it's against my religion to do that. Az I exited the Bruckner towards the Major Deegan Expressway, where I would get off one exit later and get on the Third Avenue Bridge into Manhattan. Guess what. More lane closures on the Deegan! I'm sorry. You cannot have two-thirds of the GWB closed, the entry lane onto the Bruckner closed, and one lane on the Deegan closed all at the same time. It was absolute chaos. Anyway, another ten minutes on the Deegan before I got off. Once we were off the highway it was smooth sailing; we took the Third Avenue Bridge and exited onto 129th street and Lexington Avenue, and we took the city streets up to the Heights. In total, the drive took a drop over an hour, really excellent all things considered. We heard from someone in another car on the way back, and they had left about 20 minutes before we did. We were two minutes away from my apartment when they called, and they were still on the Cross Bronx. I felt terrible for them, but I was enormously pleased with myself.

Oh yeah, and when I finally got home I really wanted to watch SportsCenter so I could see highlights of the game; I wanted to see David Wright's two home runs. Would you believe that ESPN was broadcasting the Women's College Softball World Series and ESPN2 was broadcasting NASCAR Now? It was absurd. I guess it was the Big Guy telling me it was time for bed.