There is always a way

Only the truly paranoid think that road works are deliberately planned to cause maximum congestions and confusion.  And yet, and yet.  There is a notorious bottleneck on the motorway on which I could come to school where the road narrows to two lanes.  This has been a bottleneck ever since the road opened and so the powers that be know all about it.

At the beginning of the summer road works started to take place in and around this area of the road.  The unwary might have hoped that something to help traffic flow was going to take place.  I however have lived here long enough to suspect the motives of anyone doing public works.

First they changed the road markings and then they started mucking about with the central reservation and finally they started some digging.

And on and on they dug.  My expectations that they were actually extending the width of the motorway to allow easier traffic flow was hopeful but I always came up against something solid (as indeed would the cars) that gave the lie to my thoughts: the central pillar of a motorway bridge.

Notwithstanding the firm reality of an obstacle they went on digging down and around the pillar and soon had an impressive ditch which filled (if you see what I mean) the waste land between the two sets of lanes of the motorway.  Nothing deterred by the column I though that they could take away the hard shoulder on the side of the road and the cars in the created third lane would then narrowly shave the column.  Possibly.

Then they started laying a plastic tube in an even deeper trench dug in the ditch.  The tube did not seem to link up with anything, so I assume that it was merely the civil engineering equivalent of jeu d’esprit.

Things then began to get serious and they started coning off one of the three lanes after the bottleneck and therefore made things even worse!

It’s not the hold ups that I object to; it’s the way that some drivers go on the outside lane along the static traffic expecting to be let in by cars further up.  If only Peugeots were kitted out with the flame-throwers that I have often suggested be fitted as standard in the cars of all right thinking people!

I now “wing the desolate abyss” between the two motorways that merge in Castelldefels by turning off my usual route home and taking not, admittedly a road paved by Satan but rather a convoluted link road to the Ronda Litoral and coming home “another way”.  This takes longer, but I would rather drive for a longer time than wait fuming in a stationary car for the traffic to move again.

I have also told myself that after a hold up drivers are more likely to accelerate with greater violence than they would on a normally flowing road, so there is a greater chance of an accident and even more accidents and even longer hold-ups so I am more than justified in taking a longer route.

Today I am going to run away early.  The foetal section of the school clogs the roads some twenty minutes before the rest of the school escapes so I am going to sneak out early to avoid the rush.

And it worked.  And the roads were clear.  O Joy!

And then tapas in La Fusta to get Toni out of the house as he is rapidly becoming stir crazy.  Tomorrow he goes back to the doctor to find out if his leg is improved enough for him to go to physio.  We still do not know how long he is going to be on crutches, but he did say today that it felt a little better.  So there is hope that some sort of conclusion to this episode of misery is in sight.

Roll on the weekend!