Road Trip?

In theory I’m driving down to Boston tomorrow.

My route will look something like this:

The tiny eight ball there indicates roughly where I expect to be at around 2PM local time. Why 2PM? Hold that thought.

Normally I take the southern route, going through Saint John, and crossing into Maine much closer to the ocean, but for reasons that are about to become obvious I might do it this way tomorrow–it’s less scenic, and despite what Google says it’s slowerI think their system doesn’t know about the highway upgrades this decade in NB., but it keeps me on major highways the whole way, and puts me further from the trouble. What trouble? Well… a little thing called Tropical Storm Hanna, actually.

Let’s pop over to a little story in the Globe and Mail:

Mr. Campbell said rain on Sunday could fall for about six consecutive hours, making driving treacherous, especially along busy highways or areas that are known to flood.

“It’s a matter of avoiding travel more than anything else, especially areas that are prone to being waterlogged,” he said.

While the storm will mostly be a rain event, winds gusting up to 70 kilometres an hour are expected in parts of Nova Scotia.

Yeah, apparently I’m driving right through Tropical Storm Hanna. Here’s the projected path of the storm:

Note where the center of the storm is projected to be at 2PM. Remember that eight ball?

So, yeah, I’m going to basically be driving inside the area of the storm’s effect for the whole trip, and passing directly through the storm’s center.

I love a road trip, but I really, really, hate driving in a storm. Having to concentrate hard on staying alive really interferes with the ability to get into the Blue Sky Mind, you know?

I have a suspicion that it’s going to take me a lot longer then usual to get to the US border tomorrow.

On the plus side, there is no way this storm passes over Halifax without my house losing power for a significant amount of time. NS Power is so terrible that power goes out at my place if any of my neighbours sneeze loudly, so this is sure to be a lengthy outage. Sitting through those normally makes me very, very cranky–so at least when Trish and Sarah are without power in the afternoon, they won’t have to deal with my moods.