On the Road Again - Bad Lane Karma

As if interstate driving were not bad enough, and it's bad enough to give air travel at least a consideration even as it sinks lower than anyone thought possible. While airlines now starve you; interstate highways bore you with soulless chain food. Thank goodness for those few individual eclectic little places that manage to hang on, and the people who help you find them. Worst of all the Phactor's bad line karma, a curse of unknown origins, continues to haunt me on the interstates, so no matter what the cause of traffic backups, beyond the fact that there are too many vehicles and too little road, the lane in which my vehicle is traveling will be the slowest to navigate the problem whether lane reduction, construction, tolls, or a discarded gum wrapper. On today's nearly 600 mile trek, an odyssey undertaken every couple of years when the urge to see ocean or mountains becomes over whelming, it was more of the same. To help you notice this evil lane karma, there was a sort mobile place marker, a motorhome the size of Moby Dick driven by Herb and Thelma from some small town in Ohio, and they are proud enough to emblazon this on the back side of their gigantic traffic obstacle, and if you didn't notice the 1st time you passed them, you notice the 2nd and 3d times. Yes, this massively cumbersome and slow beast actually made better time through three traffic backups. The odds are clearly against it. And all of this furthers the legend of I-80/94 from Chicago to Gary, which no matter how much they build on it remains one of the worst stretches of highway in the world.