For the second day in a row I put the top up with less than an hour of the work day left. Unlike yesterday, this time it was a very good thing. It poured. It was a mini gale. At quitting time it was still coming down very hard, but because we were leaving town to go on our long weekend we left promptly, instead of the sensible wait it out we would normally take. We got soaked walking to the car, even with an umbrella.
Maybe later I will enjoy the irony of this evening’s drive to Statesville, NC, but right now I am cursing the North & South Carolina Departments of Transportation. As we traveled north on I-77 towards Charlotte, we couldn’t help but complain about the sorry state the pavement was in. The concrete was full of potholes and big cracks caused by the passage of huge number of 18-wheelers and heavy SUVs not considered in the initial design studies. Plus, where they had made an attempt to fix these defects, they did a lousy and/or cheap job, making it no better and sometimes worse than before. Where we could get away with it, we drove in the smoother, because of less traffic use, left lane. Later in the drive while in NC we encountered 2 places where the Interstate was narrowed down to one lane which caused a 20 minute 1st gear creep to cover 2 miles. The reason that they had one lane closed was of course to repair the very damaged road surface we had been complaining of earlier.
Purchased Today: $12.50 in gas
Money spent since 03/03/03: $886.63
Started down, went up, went down, back up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 154