For the third summer in a row, it hasn’t stopped raining. Perhaps we’d been in a drought and now we’re back to normal, I don’t know. All I know is in 2017, I tried to wait for a week without rain to paint my deck and I gave up in late July and painted it in the rain and then last year, I did it again. It was actually raining on me while I painted the deck. This year, I don’t want to waste my time. Jay’s been wanting me to touch up the spots that are worn but there’s no point: we haven’t had three days in a row without rain since it stopped snowing. Normally, by the third week of July, you can let your kids run around the baseball fields but this year, the ground is all swampy and wet. The grass is all growing out of mud.
On Monday, Zack and I had plans to see a movie after his work.
First, he had to pick up a rental car at the place down the street from me. Zack was about to make his yearly Parrothead pilgrimage and he wanted a more comfortable ride than his beat up old rig. His plan was to drive to Detroit, Cincinnati and Alpine Valley for the summer concerts. He did the same thing last year and ran into a few minor snags in the renting of a car. In the end, he managed to talk the guy behind the counter into letting him have the rental. This year, Not only did the rental go smooth as silk, the young man behind the counter took one look at his ID and asked “Jay your Dad?” On answering in the affirmative, the guy told Zack he’d played at DCTC. It’s a small world but it’s Jays; the rest of us just live in it.
The movie we wanted to see was at a theater nearly halfway between our house and Zack’s apartment…
Oh yeah, Zack moved out in June. I don’t know if I’d mentioned that before. He lives up near work now, with a guy he knows from work. He still comes over once in a while so I don’t miss him too much. Anyway…
…since he’d be half way home at the theater, we decided to drive separately. That way, when the show was over, he wouldn’t have to come back here to get his car.
First problem: trying to get to a 6:00 movie anywhere in the Twin Cities. Traffic is insane. Not that we have as many cars as say, Chicago, LA or NYC but construction is so bad that at least half the lanes in town, on and off the highway are closed. This is by design. If you doubt me let me add that in addition to construction everywhere, all summer long, bike lanes have been jammed onto all our main roads. Because what could be better than hundreds of miles of dedicated bike lanes? Biking on congested city streets, that’s what!
Our overlords on the Met Council and the government of Minneapolis don’t bother hiding the fact that they really want to force us all out of our cars and into mass transit and if they have to make driving anywhere as unpleasant and time consuming as possible, that’s a small price to pay for Utopia, isn’t it? I don’t know how its going to work when a mom of three little kids needs to get groceries and furniture home from Target on her bike but if they can figure that out in rural China, we can certainly figure it out here, right? Especially when there’s six feet of snow on the ground and it’s -20 degrees. I’m sure the geniuses on the met council will figure that out. Rush hour on the highway near my house starts at noon. Since the citizens have so far refused to give up driving, the city is planning on closing some streets completely. It’s come to the attention of the city government that to avoid the congested main thoroughfares, plenty of drivers take side streets and the parkways. If you’re going to be stuck in traffic, at least in Minneapolis you can be stuck on some of the most beautiful city drives in the world.
So of course, the city is planning to shut down the parkways to cars. They aren’t even bothering to pretend there’s any reason but to force drivers into the jam.
This is life in Utopia: Conform or die.
All of that is to say that Zack and I left forty minutes early, in separate cars, to get to a theater that should have taken ten minutes to get to.
We might have made it to the movie but it started to rain. Then the rain got worse with every mile north we went.
Traffic slowed to a creep. I think it took me twenty minutes to go a mile.
Every yard north, the rain came down harder and visibility got worse. I could barely see the car in front of me. If Russell Crowe had passed me in an ark full of CGI animals, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
I don’t answer my phone when I’m driving but since I was basically parked, I answered when Zack texted Are you there yet?
I answered No. I’m stuck in traffic .
Me too. He replied. I’m in bumper to bumper. This was horribly planned.
We decided to bail. It took me another half hour to go six miles but I made it home in one piece.
What’s the point of this story?
Only that the traffic policies of Minneapolis, in their attempt to force us all into greener modes of transportation actually resulted in at least two people driving around town for an hour and winding up right back at home.
Then there was a full, double rainbow over my back yard, just like Noah!
Having missed the movie, Zack hit the road for Detroit, the first stop of his Buffett road trip. He texted us a photo of the rainbow that appeared over the stage Tuesday night.
The rain stopped for awhile but when the heat came with the sunrise, the humidity went through the roof. It was in the 90s all week. It was sunny and sticky during the day and stormy at night. Jay and I walked around the lake every day this week. We tried to walk early, when it wasn’t too hot but on Friday, it was well over 90 by the time we walked and sticky as all get out. We brought a bottle of water with us and had a Yeti full of ice water waiting for us in the car. There was a hot wind blowing that actually felt pretty good.
What makes the met council think they can stop us from driving when neither 90 degree heat nor -20 cold can keep us from walking around the lake?