"This is where they live. It is not where we live....."

Back from a quick 2 day trip to the Jersey shore. The drive down took 7 hours because there was a major crash on I-287 at the tip of the Garden State Parkway that closed ALL lanes……so we just sat praying our air conditioner and our gas would hold out as the afternoon hours ticked away. I have the route to Long Beach Island memorized so I don’t bother with a GPS, which might have warned me to take an alternate route but things happened so fast that I’m not sure it would have mattered. If we had left the house 20 minutes earlier we would have gotten through, which sounds kinda dickish to even say because somebody died up there a few short miles ahead of us. Perhaps on their way to the same beach for the same reason. Life is terrifyingly random. When traffic moved, it was once again filled with wild drivers darting in and out of lanes like they were Popeye Doyle, the same kind of reckless driving that caused the multiple hour stand-still in the first place. There is not much self-awareness (or self-reflection) for what Jerseyites call us “sand lizards” on the way to their beaches.