* STellendam * STop * STuck * ooSTende *
Saturday, June 20th, 2009by a weary driver
Oostende, Belgium
At 246km, it was slated to be our longest driving day so far. And if we remember correctly that it took us eleven hours to travel only 200km in Laos, then today rivals that record too. Not because the road was treacherous or because we were climbing mountains; we simply got stuck in a traffic jam.
For one hour.
Two hours.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Six.
Seven hours.
Yes, seven hours in one traffic jam going almost nowhere. Even blatting along at 90km/hr for much of the journey did little to raise our day’s average speed – 21km/hr!
We were aiming to arrive in Oostende early afternoon so that we would be assured of getting two parking spots for the night in preparation for catching the ferry tomorrow. We have learnt it is best to turn up early on a Saturday. We did not expect to be still sitting in traffic in the late afternoon! About 5pm we thought we were finally approaching the hold-up tunnel and with well over 120km still to travel, agreed we would keep driving once we were through. We’d stop for dinner at 7pm.
Oh no we wouldn’t. At seven we still hadn’t entered the tunnel. That moment was still half an hour away! And if we thought (as we did) that we would start zooming once the five lanes of traffic had merged into one, we were wrong. We continued to stop-start creep through the one-lane-open two-lanes-closed tunnel. At least this gave us time to inspect the 0.6million euros worth of work being done. Except there was nothing to see other than a “men working” sign. Certainly no sign of any men or any work either. Bizarre. Out the other side of the tunnel were road works for a few kilometres – that is to say, there was evidence that road works were in progress, although nothing was happening on a Saturday afternoon and the road remained blocked off – holding traffic captive at its near standstill pace for A Bit Longer. Bizarre.
You’d think that with the prospects of a seven hour delay for thousands of vehicles including hundreds of trucks, the authorities would have suggested a recommended detour. We’d have happily travelled an extra hour out of our way instead of sitting almost motionless for seven hours!
Mind you, then we wouldn’t have had friendly conversations out the windows with fellow trapped travellers, we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to walk up and down the motorway collecting knitting, delivering sandwiches, grabbing apples, we wouldn’t have considered making some money hiring out our on-board toilet and offering coffee and chocolate “Te koop”, and we probably wouldn’t have had fun naming our travelling companions….Mrs Mercedes, whose cream suit camouflaged her perfectly against the cream leather upholstery in her sparkling new car….The Currant Bun Couple who ate two buns each, put another two away for later and then when later arrived, they ate them…..the bockwurst bunch, who ate their sausages straight from the jar and later switched to apples…Herr Polskiego, who kept swerving over the road presumably to see what was happening up ahead, the Horn Happies (at one stage a dozen or so vehicles all started honking in unison – at other times random honks vented pent-up frustration), the Croissant Lady, the Stalled Girl, the Turks, Mrs Chinese who read an entire Dutch newspaper, the Africans (who asked for some of our sandwiches!), Mr Shiek (it seemed half of the Arab nations were in our traffic jam)……
After six hours of sitting in her carseat (what a trooper!!!), and having travelled only 500 metres in the previous hour, it was decided that it was safe enough for ERgirl3 to be released from captivity. Tgirl5 also appeared at the back window, wearing a most appropriate t-shirt!
Grandpa pretended to do Sudokus and dropped none-too-subtle hints about food.
Rob played the goat (and this pic is BEFORE he went through his try-to-make-a-story-up-from-every-sign-we-see phase….that got REALLY goaty, but I think you need to have been sitting in non-moving traffic for a whole day to be able to appreciate any of it and so I won’t try to make you laugh with us by sharing the details – you really had to be there – heehee).
I took pictures, knowing that we were living today’s story.
including out the rear view mirror to match Tgirl5’s t-shirt
Time on the road: need to check Jboy13’s record!
Distance covered: 246km
rayres