Thursday, June 13, 2013

Rain, Traffic, and Daniel's B-Day!

I take Daniel to his practices twice a week usually, Wednesday and Thursday evenings. His football practices go from 8 to 10 p.m. We usually are able to get to his field in about 50 minutes, and return in around 40. I'm guessing we drive about 20 miles.

We are officially in rainy season here in Mexico, which is generally a good thing. The rain damps down the dust and clears out the air. What was once brown and dry is transformed into lush countryside. We like the rain. Except when we don't. Last night was one of those times.

It was raining constantly from the momento we arrived at the practice field till the momento the coach called off practice early at 9:15 p.m.  Good. We would get home a bit early. Oh, was I so wrong!

We navigated Periferico, and were close to where we lived previously in Iztapalapa when the traffic started backing up. I decided to take a secondary road over to another main "eje" or traffic artery, in order to escape the traffic where we were. Oops. I really don't know how our trip would have been had we stayed on that other road, but I can't imagine it would have been worse that what we ended up experiencing.

It took us 4 1/2 hours to get home. That's right, after leaving at 9:15 p.m. we eventually arrived home at 1:45 in the morning! That's an average speed of 4.5 miles per hour. There were huge periods of time where I turned the car off and Daniel and I just sat there.

When it rains, all the water runs off the hills surrounding the southeast section of Mexico City, and forms enormous puddles of water. One of these lakes forms at the junction of Eje 5,6 and Ermita. All the traffic headed to the southeast really has very few options as to alternate routes. In the middle of the mess, Daniel looked over and saw a familiar face. Our neighbor two doors down was right next to us. We followed each other home!

But hey, it was a good excuse to cancel school today. Not that we really needed a good excuse. Daniel turns 15 today! Happy birthday son!

Update: I saw on a Mexican internet page that Zaragoza, the main road heading out of Mexico City, was actually closed for a couple of hours. Check out pics HERE.


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