Friday the 13th Traffic NIghtmares

It's Friday the 13th.

My daughter and I had the day off from school today, so we decided to spend the afternoon at the Cincinnati Museum Center. It's a fabulous museum, and now that my daughter is older we don't spend sooooo much time in the Children's museum. Today she asked to visit the Cincinnati History wing - one of my favorite places. We looked at a detailed model of 1940's Cincinnati (really cool!), wandered through WWII era artifacts, a reconstruction of a river boat and river town from the 1800's - complete with shops and hands-on opportunities. The Museum Center also has an Omnimax theater. We saw "Dinosaurs Alive," a film shown on a 5-story, 72-foot diameter, tilted and domed screen. There is a dinosaur exhibit as well, but we didn't have time to see it today. My girl wants to go back on Monday to explore again. We had a great time, until...

... the commute home.

Cincinnati traffic on interstate 75 is notoriously awful. We were traveling along fairly well, and then everything stopped except the car that was three cars behind me. It plowed into the little black car in front of it at full speed, and shoved it under the Jeep behind me that plowed into the rear of my van. My girl seems to be fine, but I'm getting more sore by the minute. The back of my poor van is a mess. It'll need a new bumper, and new hatch, new lights, and possibly a side panel as well. The officers wouldn't share insurance information because their priority (as it should be) was to make sure everyone was okay and clear the highway before rush hour made it to full swing. We got an officer name and a report number, an assurance that all the needed information was in the report, and then we were released.

Traffic on the way home was even worse - bumper to bumper semi-trucks and all sorts of commuters heading home. I thought we were doing okay until I heard a huge clunk from behind the van. My girl looked at me with big eyes and said, "What was that??" I didn't see anything on the road behind me except two SUVs working hard to get into another lane besides mine. There was nowhere to pull over. So I said, "I don't know, but I think we're either going to lose our bumper or our lights are falling apart." It took awhile, but we made it to an exit and to a parking lot where I discovered one light had fallen. It was swinging by its wires. With a little bit of duct tape we were good to go.

I took back roads the rest of the way home, and I will never again travel I 75 during any hour even remotely close to rush hour.