Photoblogging : My Daughter and her friends like to act silly

September 08, 2007

I got a phone call on my way home from work yesterday evening. It seems my daughter wanted to use my video camera to create a 'techno video' for her upcoming Halloween party. I didn't know what all that entailed but since I carry my camera with me, I assured her I would be home right away.

About two minutes after I got off of that phone call, suddenly traffic came to a halt. I had just passed the Mid Rivers Mall drive exit and was, in fact, almost beneath the overpass when this happened. No worries I thought, this will clear up soon enough.

Once I had been sitting there for a few minutes I knew there must be an accident up ahead. As firetrucks, ambulances, and police cars, zoomed past on the shoulder it became quite clear it must have been a major accident. I waited with some level of patience at first. I pulled out my Archos 604, propped it up on the dash, and finished watching a movie I had been in the middle of before.

After about 40 minutes I started to really begin to wonder. People were getting out of their cars by now and socializing. I called my wife and she said that the news was reporting a major accident involving a tractor trailer and some cars just barely a half a mile ahead of me.

Behind me, back only a hundred yards or so the Mid Rivers Mall drive was beckoning. However, trapped over in the left hand lane in three lanes of traffic there was no way I was going to get anywhere. What really annoyed me is, because it had been raining, I was driving my four wheel drive SUV and, had I been in the right hand lane, I could have just kicked in the 4wd and went off-roading to get out of the mess.

Eventually a couple of people started driving up the on-ramp (heading up to Mid Rivers mall drive backwards!) Of course, this led them nowhere and a cop quickly came down and parked his car in front of the on-ramp to block any more trouble like that.

We spoke to the cop and found out that it had not just been one accident, but actually a series of about a dozen separate accidents involving multiple tractor trailers and almost 70 cars!!

Hardly a half a mile in front of me a 'squall' had suddenly whipped up and shut down visibility instantly to zero. Now I knew I was not going to be home any time soon. Once I had this news I walked all of the way back to the Mid Rivers Mall drive exit and was pleased to see some people turning around and driving the wrong way on the freeway to get out. As I walked back to my car I told everyone we had a plan to just slowly back everyone out to the last exit.

This process took quite some time and, of course, once I finally did get to the exit all of the surface roads were jammed. My drive home ended up taking two and a half hours for what is supposed to a 15 minute commute.

Today, being a rainy day, I spent most of the afternoon working on a Summer 2007 Newsletter for Troy DeMolay chapter. It is nearly done and I can probably have it finished in just a few more hours. I will post a PDF copy online when it is finished. It has lots of great pictures of the many events we have been involved in these past few months.

When I did finally get home last night my daughter had a bunch of her friends over to create a video. They wore numerous costumes and painted their faces.

It was good clean fun and they had a great time. I suppose some version of the edited video will end up on YouTube at some point but, for now, here are some photographs from last evening's excitement.