The Puzzling Holiday Traffic

So this year is really my first year experiencing American Thanksgiving. Last year I was here in California as well but my experience was somewhat insulated from the full on nutty travel surge even though last year I was part of that travel surge and this year I wasn't.

Last year Candy and I went to visit her family in Sacramento. That meant catching a very short cab ride to the Burbank airport and using curbside check-in for our flight. All quite speedy and the airport didn't seem anymore busy than any other airport I've been in at any other time.

This year, though Candy and I stayed home, her friend Todd was flying out of the Los Angeles International airport (LAX) on a trip to Amsterdam to visit his girlfriend. We expected there to be some traffic so we left very early. We didn't compensate for the traffic nearly enough. What is normally a twenty minute trip down the freeway turned into a nearly three hour trip. We got ourselves off of the freeway as it was barely moving, only to discover that the regular streets were just as insanely clogged.

Candy's road warrior like driving, although successful in surpassing much of the other traffic, still wasn't enough to see Todd make his flight, which cruelly enough had even been bumped ahead by fifteen minutes. He apparently missed his last opportunity to board by ten minutes. Which is a pretty good scam I think on the part of Northwest Airlines as, had they not moved the flight up he would have made it with five minutes to spare. So he had to re-book for an additional $200 for a flight the next day.

Driving him down the following day we took an alternate freeway route to avoid all the last minute traffic on the freeway we used the day before. As we pulled into the airport (after a brief and normal 20 minute trip) I looked down the other freeway (the 405), and sure enough it was plugged right up as the day before.

My question is why does this happen? There are plenty of alternate routes to the airport, yet everyone takes the same one, because it seems the most direct I assume. Consulting Map Quest will take you on that very same route. It makes sense to me that were one not familiar with what to expect traffic-wise, as we were, that one would get caught in that traffic jam, but I suspect that most of those travelers have done this year after year after year. It couldn't have been the first time all of us were traveling to that particular airport for the holiday. I think people like to complicate their life sometimes, even if by sticking to what they know (which seems like keeping things simple), just to have stories to tell, or to have something to complain about and blame for how miserable life is treating them. It's not something they do consciously, mostly, but I do think many people thrive on conflict and strife. It all just seems rather silly.

Yesterday was a very good day, and that suits me just fine....'course I wouldn't have had anything to write about had we not got stuck in traffic the day before. Here's to more days with fewer blog entries. :)

All Blogged Up and No Audience to Show

So here it is my first blog post, and where's my audience? Well, that's really my fault isn't it, as I haven't publicized this blog at all really. Oh sure, that will change to some extent as I let people know about the updates to my website, but its not really my intention to go making a big deal about my web log. Why? Well, because there's a zillion blogs out there. Everyone babbles on about the little things of greater or lesser importance in their life. Others do as I'm doing here and babble on hypocritically about the pointlessness of blogs. So really I'm not contributing anything new and amazing to the sub-wonderful land of Blog, so there's no sense in promoting it.

The point of my blog, as some of the better blogs are, will be to let my friends and family around the world and maybe the occasional stranger know what's going on in my world, and since I'm not where ever they are to voice my usual heavy handed opinion on all things trivial and grand, let them know my thoughts on everything and anything going on in the world...or at least in mine. Oh wait, that's what some of the worst blogs are about. Oh wait, that's what all blogs are.

The thing I find interesting about blogs, corporate or private, news spewing, or opinion ranting, is that they often try to present themselves as offering some new perspective on things. We live in a world where, in the UK at least, the most popular song requested by the departed to have played at their funeral is "I Did It My Way" and yet I look around and most of the people spend their time making sure they and everyone else is doing it the same way. Heck if you really did it your way, then pick a more original song...or at least record your own version of the song yourself to be played at your funeral. Sure it might sound awful but at least there'd be some honesty to it. Anyway, my point is that there are very few ways to truly do something original, short of just falling into a completely anarchical mode of existence, which ironically enough, has been done plenty of times by plenty of others and now too is quite unoriginal.

So the not-so-short of it is that I'm not going to try to dupe anyone into thinking I'm presenting anything original here. This may have been more original back in 1998 before the world of blogs when I posted rants of my own and the feedback from others that it generated on my website, and had I had the programming savvy or such friends with some ambition (programming knowledge and ambition are hard combinations to find) I may have been ahead of things. But instead I'm just here trying not to be bitter, contributing to the pointless babble that gluts the internet.

You'll find, in the future, all the same sorts of things here that you'll find on any other blog; opinion flavoured rantings, pictures of family and friends and myself, snippets of news, with the occasional interesting link, bad grammar, made up words and of course postings from others containing much of the same. So that's why there's no hard sell, that's why there's no great promotion. You may find my blog of interest, which I hope you do, long rambling as it may tend to be from time to time, and if you don't, thanks for stumbling by just the same. Post a comment, come back and check for a response, and maybe even once and a while we'll pretend like we're contributing something special to the world.