Road Worrier 23: Travel Reports and Advice

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What has happened to America's highways? Maybe I grew accustomed to traveling along the same road for the past year with only a smattering of traffic and the typical amount of road work that one expects over a year's time. But today, I discovered a new kind of hell and it was one of the reasons I hesitated to take a road trip this week to begin with.

Let me start out by saying that I have driven this route multiple times and have never encountered the absolute lack of concern for those of us trying to get from point A to point B.

Throughout much of a well-known corridor in my traveling experience, the main culprits today were Atlanta, Chattanooga, and Nashville. I would normally recommend avoiding the corridor on I-24 between Nashville and Chattanooga at any time of day, or time of year. But I risked it today because it was Saturday and I was expecting that maybe the normal rules of rush hour and whatnot would not apply. I was mistaken on all counts. I didn't hit any of these cities during a typical rush hour. Yet the traffic was a traveler’s quagmire, and as I approached each of the cities, I was welcomed by alerts in Google Maps indicating that I would be there for longer than I wanted to be. But at least those alerts told me that there were quicker routes around the terrors that awaited any travelers who dared to keep to the well-worn paths of the interstates.

ATLANTA

In Atlanta, I have found my natural traffic enemy, and I avoid it as much as possible. But since I live an hour due east of Atlanta, any time I want to go west, it becomes unavoidable. Today, unfortunately, took the cake. Not only was the traffic on I-85 South, heading into Atlanta, the normal touch-and-go traffic that you expect, but the 285 perimeter on the north side had special horrors awaiting. And my GPS at least took me around some of that with a well-timed exit ramp, but that was not the end, as I-75 North also presented myriad problems, and for no particular reason. I'm okay if it's a situation where road work has been going on for days or weeks or, these days, it seems to be going on for years. And so you can understand that; you know that's coming. But we sat through 10 minutes of standstill traffic without signs of a wreck or road work or any real reason for us to have wasted our lives staring at the rear lights of the car in front of us for that long.

CHATTANOOGA

Chattanooga is apparently undergoing some sort of apocalypse and I-24 is shut down. So, the good news is, if you're going through Chattanooga on I-75, you won't have any problems. But if you want to go to the west or to the northwest of the city, be ready for some major detours. GPS directed me, and at least half of the other travelers on I-75, to get off at exit 353, and take surface roads, through podunk little towns along the Georgia-Tennessee border and finally reunited us with I-24 45 minutes later. The town of Rossville was the only one I caught the name of. On the plus side, I did pass the entrance to Rock City, which you see signs dotting the interstate for miles on either side of Chattanooga advertising. I've been there before, but it was in my misspent youth and so I would not have been able to tell you how to get there again. And I'm sorry to report that I now know how to get there again. The traffic on that particular part of the trip was abominable. Like I said, I wasn't the only one taking the Google Maps tour of extreme Northwest Georgia. But it was even more crowded as we got close to I-24, after we crossed the Tennessee state line. I can't understand why the traffic just does not move or, if these areas are aware that traffic is being diverted through their towns, that they don't have more preparation for the increased traffic over such a period of time.

NASHVILLE

The last culprit for today was Nashville, and I really can't explain why. I remember seeing that more lanes were closed on one of the main interstates through the city, and so Google Maps rerouted me along surface streets right before that happened. That was an interesting tour through Eastern Nashville, but I don't know how much time it actually saved because several of the streets that I had to maneuver through were also very busy. And when I got back on I-24,the same problem was staring me in the face: namely, lots of brake lights. We finally got out of Nashville, and it was mostly good until we got to Clarksville, right before crossing into Kentucky. I wouldn't have even noted the issue and would have just said, “I guess I hate Tennessee now.” But I really had to go to the bathroom and was looking forward to getting to that Kentucky rest stop just on the other side of the border. The traffic gods, however, had other ideas for us. And so, we sat in another 15-minute delay for no apparent reason around Clarksville. Once I got to Kentucky, though, it was absolutely liberating.

One of the bright spots of this trip was the most unexpected, when I got about 30 miles outside of Chattanooga and found that it was virtually smooth sailing up to Nashville. Normally, this is one of my most dreaded passages for heading from Georgia to the Midwest because they have ungodly amounts of traffic on the two-lane interstate between Chattanooga and Nashville with the curvy interstates, dodging the Appalachian Mountains, and going up the hills and down the hills when the road planners couldn’t avoid those mountains. It feels littered with semis and runaway truck ramps and road work, oh my! But this time, the only problems were the intermittent semis that were taking the slow lane (when it rarely widened to 3 lanes) going up the mountains. I consider that a win.

And speaking of win, I can't avoid speaking of the wind on this trip. One of my friends had her house destroyed by the tornadoes in Arkansas yesterday. And one of the reasons that I put off leaving my house this morning at an earlier time (when I normally would have left) was because those storms were coming through Georgia. And I didn't want to drive through that. But that didn't mean that the winds were still not whipping up throughout the voyage today. Several times, I had to grab the steering wheel more tightly or risk being blown off into the guardrail. I noticed many of the tractor trailers having the same problems, and I wonder if some of the unexplained brake lights for long periods of time might not have been reactions to these strong winds far in front of me, and the trickle-down effect of the brake light phenomenon created these awful periods of red roads on Google Maps.

After Tennessee, however, I can't remember seeing another set of brake lights until the sun set. I made my way through Kentucky and into Illinois and was rewarded with only a brief stint on I-57 North to Marion. And now I'm in my hotel room at the Motel 6 next to the airport in Marion, Illinois.

This voyage should have taken no more than 7.5 hours. Yet it took nearly 10 today. Suffice it to say that I will reconsider ever beginning a road trip of this length on a Saturday ever again. And I will never make the trip from Atlanta to Chattanooga to Nashville if there is ever any other way to go.

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