A long, short drive

I'm late with today's post! And I'm late because of traffic. Let me explain: today Pat and I had to drive to south Denver twice. First, to have dinner with friends and then pick something up from another friend who lives in Highlands Ranch, a suburb south of Denver; second, to return that thing to the same friend later on in the evening.

It used to be that if you wanted to drive to south Denver on a Sunday evening, it was a straight shot north up the interstate and 45 quick minutes in very light traffic. Not so much anymore. As we struggled simply to get clear of Colorado Springs, I finally aquiesced to the fact that it is no longer possible to get to Denver so quickly, even on a Sunday evening. The Colorado Springs metro area now has around 600,000 people when you include the smaller fringe towns and bedroom communities that surround our city. That makes for a lot of traffic. Denver hasn't gotten any farther away, but it sure feels like it!

So we were a little late for dinner, but made good time to our friend Orin's house afterward, to pick up a computer part. On the way home we got stuck in a construction project on Monument Hill, and it was such slow going that it took us nearly 45 minutes to drive four miles through the cone zone. The agony of a full bladder on top of that did not make me a very happy camper! And we still had to drive back to Orin's to return the thing later on! What we saw when we headed back northward to Orin's was the same cone zone as before, plus another one a few miles up the highway. This forced us to take an alternate, rural route on our way home from Orin's, because we did not want to get stuck in TWO endless traffic jams just a few miles apart.

Anyway, as a result I am late with my 7/12 post. This makes me crabby! Even though it's now the 13th, I'm backdating this post to 11:59pm on 7/12 for continuity's sake. I guess the bright side of all this is, as we crawled along trying to get home from our first Denver run, I managed to get quite a few photos of the rather spectacular sunset that was unfolding to our west.