failed vacation

I had this week off for my first paid vacation in years, since 2001. I did not know that this was also the first week of classes for Allison. When we went to Boise State, school never started till the week of Martin Luther King Jr day. It would start on the Tuesday of that week. Well, Indiana University starts a week before that. How unfair is that. Luckily Allison was able to work around somethings and make it so that we could go out of town on Wednesday afternoon for the week.

Our adventure started off well. I decide to take interstate 65 to Chattanooga because it was the easiest route to follow. Once in Columbus you only had to turn once in Nashville to get to on the right interstate to Chattanooga. The trip was going very smoothly. No problems. We had a little rain, but other than that it was all good, until we hit Kentucky. Oh, Kentucky is the bane of my life. It makes life difficult at ever corner. Crossing into Louisville was difficult. Apparently a different bridge was close than the one we were using. So twice the traffic on our bridge. The thing that happened was Dixie Highway was closed which is near I-264, which is what you would use to get around. We didn't know why it was closed at the time, but it was because of a police chase and crash. That wasn't bad. I figured it was normal or a little heavy traffic for getting into Louisville. We passed through Louisville with no problems, other than I need to use the rest room and we were in downtown Louisville. Outside of Louisville we found a bathroom and lunch.

Getting back on the road was the problem. It was a little after one in the afternoon. We didn't know what was waiting for us. After entering into Bullitt County we hit traffic like no other. It almost came to a complete stop, actually it did for about two hours. In those two hours I was able to move my car two miles and get off at a rest stop. The VW wasn't doing so great by this time. Idling for two hours had put a toll on the little car. We stopped at the rest stop for another two hours. We watched as the cars slowly moved on. Sometimes not moving at all. It was bad. I called up 511 and found out that all the lanes were closed ahead and there was a multi-car crash ahead, about 10 to 13 miles away. Later checking the reports I found out that a semi had leaked diesel fuel on the road making it very hazardous. Then lots of cars and semis had an accident. The reports also said the lanes would be all closed till late afternoon. Considering I didn't get back on the road till after five and traffic was still not moving very fast this seems hardly likely.

During are stay at the rest stop I felt the desire not to go on. Allison felt the same way. It meant giving up the vacation I had been looking forwards to for a very long time, but we could deny what we were feeling. So when we got on the interstate again we drove the one mile the next exit and turned around and came home. We were home by eight. This is amazing because we wouldn't have been to Chattanooga till after midnight with all the delays. There were more accidents on I-65 after the one we were trying to get through. If nothing had gone wrong we would have made it to Chattanooga by seven. I guess some thing this trip was not suppose to happen. I don't know if something horrible would have happened to us if we did make it or not. I figure the spirit was telling us to turn around. I don't know what was bound to happen to us, but I can only guess it was going to be bad. That the thing, when you follow the spirit you can only assume that bad things were going to happen. You'll never truly know though.