A rather unusual wedding - and a whole lot of traffic.
It's not every day you have such a combination of experiences
So we went to a wedding last weekend in Seattle. Actually it was north of Seattle in a town called Arlington. Actually it was out in the woods near Arlington. Remote as all get-out. Took a while to figure out where it was and even longer to get there.
This was a wedding involving good friends and special people. Getting married was the son of our dear longtime friends, a young man we have known since … birth.
I say all this to make a point. We experienced a well-known and very common experience (but somewhat unfamiliar to us) …
We ran into the modern scourge of mankind – traffic.
Or to be more precise, traffic jams. Endless traffic jams. It was terrible. We spent hours and hours sitting in one continuous traffic jam after another. It took forever getting there and back. It was horrible and something I do not wish to repeat any time soon.
I am simply not wired to sit in an automobile for hours on end while going nowhere (is anybody?). Honestly it felt a bit like torture. It was like punishment.
We left on Saturday around mid-morning after meeting a friend who was carpooling with us. His wife had gone up ahead to help with the wedding preparations. In fact, our beginning turned out to be a bad omen because we got stuck behind a really long slow moving train in Salem - you know, the kind where people eventually bail and turn around to find another way to get around the unending train.
However, we sailed through Portland without much problem, but we hit traffic in Olympia Washington and it was bumper to bumper until we got well north of Seattle. It seemed like forever. Fortunately we left early and gave ourselves plenty of time. As it turned out, we needed it.
The whole trip was around 280 miles and took nearly six hours. And going home was not much better. On that trip, we left Everett at 8:30 on Sunday morning and moved south through Seattle pretty quickly and were making good time … until we hit Portland, when traffic basically stopped. Something related to work on the 405 bridge. It was hideous.
The return trip took over five hours. So we spent a total of twelve hours driving there and back. We were only there at the wedding and the overnight stay for around sixteen hours. Not a good equation. We spent 43% of our time sitting in a car - and half of that not moving. Nobody’s idea of fun, certainly not mine.
Fiona and I live in the country, near Jefferson Oregon. We are not used to this kind of misery. In our modern world, with all the progress and technology, it seems like we are still fairly primitive when it comes to getting around in cars.
I heard a statistic one time that said 25% of all gasoline was consumed in automobiles while they were not moving. That is a staggering amount of fuel, just burning away in the engine and polluting the atmosphere.
And the amount of time wasted is also mind numbing. The average commuter in a big city spends almost a week and a half each year sitting in traffic. At some point this becomes counter-productive.
All I know is, I hate sitting in traffic, and rural living gives me a better chance of avoiding it.
Moving on, it was a cool wedding …
So this was not your ordinary wedding. For one thing it was deep in the woods, a long way from anywhere. They had done a good job of setting things up and there was good food and beverage available. The actual ceremony was simple (if unorthodox) and was pretty short. There were a lot of bridesmaids and groomsmen. There were a lot of hipsters.
They had music and lots of people and it was relaxed and fun.
A more unusual element of the wedding was a cirque du soleil kind of acrobatic display of two young ladies hanging on a silk “curtain” and climbing all over each other. It was rather impressive, except their music stopped working halfway through and they had to improvise, and oh, it started raining.
There was a really bright spotlight shining on the act, and as it was in the middle of the dark forest, it added to the striking image of the performance.
One more item of note:
During our challenging journey to make it to the event, I made one of several inquisitive turns onto dirt roads, trying to find the right location. Somewhere in this process, our Volvo began to make a loud squealing sound that was very disconcerting. It was troubling to realize that we might be having car problems out in the middle of nowhere.
When we finally pulled into the parking area for the wedding, the sound was very distinctive, and people turned heads and wondered “what the … ?” It was somewhat embarrassing, although we quickly parked and just figured that we would deal with it later.
However, it was somewhat hard to relax and enjoy the event with a car that seemed to be having problems and was making an ungodly noise and … would we make it home tonight?
So after the ceremony and dinner I eventually asked a young man (Noah) with whom we were long acquainted to help me identify the problem. I made my approach with the time honored “hey ole buddy ole pal …” and since this activity involved rolling around underneath the car, I was looking for some help, especially from a guy with some mechanical talent.
We walked out into the darkness using our iPhones for flashlights, and examined the offending part of the vehicle. It didn’t take long for Noah to spot the rock stuck in the shroud of the brake pad. This kind of problem makes a horrendous sound, but is fortunately easy to fix. He pulled out his trusty knife and pried out the stone, and instantly the problem was fixed. Nice job my friend!
We were able to enjoy the rest of the evening and the circus show, and it was a fine and memorable wedding.
And then we had to drive home …..
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