Getting There is Half the Fun?

Who said that? Someone who was never subjected to a TSA security check and never drove from Dallas to San Antonio by way of Austin.

Okay, so we left last Friday. It was raining and half the city streets in downtown Dallas were closed off due to some kind of JFK memorial thing that was held for 5,000 of the Dallas elite. I have to assume that the closing of those streets pushed additional traffic onto I-35.

It was manic. Highways converging, people trying to merge and everything pretty much at a standstill. We had the wrong GPS in the car. (Mark's is new and tells you which lane to be in. Mine isn't that fancy, and it's vague at best. But then most days I know where I'm going.) I was driving so Mark could finish writing the report for the inspection he'd done that morning. I couldn't tell which lane I needed to be in because of all the trucks in front of me blocking the signs. Mark was urging me to just nose into whichever lane I wanted to be in. (Easier to do if you know which one it is.) But while he was looking at his screen, I was watching the road and I saw two people directly in front of me decide to switch lanes at the same time and sideswipe each other. When they stopped to get out and check for damage, it was easy to change lanes.

The bottom line is that we sat in that Dallas traffic for a good hour. When we left home, the GPS clocked our estimated arrival time at 6:12. By the time we were outside the Dallas city limits headed toward Waco, our estimated arrival time had been changed to 7:10.


It was still raining but outside the city the traffic moved at a normal pace. Mark didn't like the way I was driving. I like to set my cruise control and cruise. But when people are behaving stupidly around me, it makes Mark nervous. He wanted me to pull over and let him drive. I wanted him to finish his report and leave me to it.

We wanted to go through Fredericksburg instead of Austin. It's a little out of the way, but when you consider that you have to sit in Austin traffic for at least an hour, it just seems like the right thing to do. Since Mark was still in the passenger seat, it was his job to program the GPS to go to Fredericksburg. Unfortunately, the only Fredericksburg our GPS could find was in Norway. Not Texas, Norway. Well, we didn't want to go there.

Mark threatened to throw the GPS out the window. I told him if he did that, he should be prepared to retrieve it. He was prepared to stop at a Best Buy and get me a new one, but he was not prepared to retrieve anything he threw out the window. I did convince him that it would be better to toss it into the back seat rather than out the window.

He checked the back seat for maps. The only map we had was a Dallas Mapsco. It shows all the streets in Dallas. It might have been helpful when we were merging and converging, but it wasn't going to get us to Fredericksburg.

In the meantime, we were still headed for Austin. Having given up on going through Fredericksburg, Mark checked on Google and discovered that there is a toll road that we could pick up at Georgetown to bypass Austin. We would probably regain the hour we'd lost in Dallas. We stopped for gas and changed drivers since he knew where to look for the toll road and I didn't.

We took that toll road and got off on 290 West. I don't know whether we got off too soon, or what. What I do know was that we were still north of Austin and headed back toward I-35 South. At this point, Mark decided that it was not possible to reach San Antonio because the GPS did not work properly. And I had to register my complaint that he was drifting between lanes because he was looking at his gadgets instead of minding the road. So now it falls to me to navigate using my iPhone. I selected San Antonio and told Mark to get on I-35 North. Which he did.


"What? Are we going home then?", he asked.
"What do you mean?"
We're going back north. It's the way we came. Are you taking us back home?"
"No. I don't know. I know I-35 North isn't right. Oh, wait, it's taking us to San Antonio STREET, in Austin. Not San Antonio the city. Give me a minute."

Mark continued to complain that the GPS didn't work and that the phone navigation didn't work.

I had to ask, "What is it you want me to do?"

The traffic was horrible, the weather was horrible and we were sniping at each other. Where was the fun?

In the end, we got turned around and headed back south on I-35. Straight through the heart of Austin. Our new arrival time was something like 8:05. Only two hours later than our original estimate.We were a bit tired and starving to death. Lucky there was a Morton's Steakhouse right across the street from our hotel.

But let me assure you, getting there was NOT half the fun.