I Love Traffic

I love traffic.

In this part of southern New England the traffic to and from Cape Cod every summer weekend is legendary. More and more people are wanting to spend their weekends on Cape Cod to enjoy the beaches, the seaside towns, the natural beauty, kayaking, cycling, shark spotting… not to mention this weekend a Sunfish Regional at Wequaquet Lake and the Hyannis Regatta where a number of my friends are sailing Lasers and Radials.

Cape Cod is so popular - and all the traffic has to funnel across the two bridges over Cape Cod Canal - that six hour traffic delays are not unknown. One local Laser fleet (not on the Cape) even schedules its weekend races to avoid the worst of the heavy traffic coming from the Cape on local roads on Sunday afternoons. It's no fun sitting in traffic for several hours just to travel a few miles.

But I love traffic.

I should be Laser sailing on the Cape at Hyannis this weekend but I'm still rehabbing my sore back. So there I was sitting at home on Friday afternoon and feeling a bit sorry for myself when the phone rang. It was my son who lives in Massachusetts. He had been thinking of taking his kids to the beach but when he checked online he realized that this would be a bad idea because the route to their favorite beach was blocked with… you guessed it… all those cars going very very slowly to Cape Cod. So he asked if it would be OK to bring his family to our house in Rhode Island for the weekend (a journey which is not encumbered by the Cape traffic) with the intention of taking them to a beach near our house on Saturday instead.

Of course we said YES. And now on Saturday morning we have four grandkids in the house and, as I write this, I can hear the patter of tiny feet and the chatter of happy tiny voices.

Life is good.

I love traffic.