We spent a lovely day yesterday visiting friends 41 miles (according to the trip odometer) north of here.  The ride back was quick and uneventful, until, 7 or 8 miles from home, the hungry cat waiting for his hours’ overdue dinner, the snappy 82 mile roundtrip turned into an exercise in something else.

Brake lights, as far as the eye could see, with the lights of the bridge tolls in sight. Construction on the bridge, why not do it at 10:00 on a Saturday night?   This is NY, the attitude is “fuck ’em,” and so they did.

We might have known about it in time to take another route (although a sign on the highway had warned us of construction and delays on the alternate Whitestone), but the device that runs the app that warns us of traffic nightmares was out of power, no car charger with us.  As we sat in the mass of idling cars the other navigational device kept cheerfully chirping out its instructions, in an Australian accent.  “Continue straight, to toll, then enter Throgs Neck Bridge,” he said again, as Sekhnet struggled to figure out how to mute him.  At 10:17, when we stopped, we were 0.4 miles from the toll.  The traffic report on the radio was spectacularly short on specifics as we sat among the gas breathing cars.

By 10:30 we’d inched about 0.1 a mile.  Announcing this annoyed Sekhnet, who said nothing at first, but snarled when I made the same announcement at 10:40– ten minutes, another 0.1 of a mile.  A quick calculation revealed that we were not actually stopped, but traveling at a peppy one mile an hour.  We’d be through the toll by 11:00 at that rate, I thought conservatively.  But the estimate turned out to have been optimistic, as the several right lanes unaccountably continued moving and merging in front of our stalled lane (the two right lanes on the bridge were closed, we were in the lane that was open– go figure).  We didn’t pass through the tolls until 11:30.  It took about ninety minutes, with five or six lanes merging to two, and then one, before we reached the point on the bridge where the lanes reopened and traffic spread out and resumed at 55 mph.  

Less than ten minutes later we were home, the cat eating with great gusto as each of us hurried off to a bathroom.