Traffic at a standstill

Parked on the interstate

Isaac and I got up early this morning and drove to Louisville for a meeting with his study-abroad group. (He is going to Berlin for about a month after school gets out and will take two German history classes there.)

We expected to arrive in Louisville with lots of time to spare, but fate intervened. Just north of Elizabethtown, we sat on I-65 for two hours, waiting for an accident to be cleared from the roadway.

It was a gorgeous spring morning. People got out of their cars,  walked their dogs, took pictures, and struck up conversations. One kid played with his skateboard. Isaac was wishing for a kite to fly.

The girls in the car beside us were driving back to Ohio after spending spring break in Florida. The couple in the car behind us was headed for Chicago.

Rumors were passed by people walking by. One lady said that someone had read on the internet that a family of six had been killed. Another time we heard that a tractor-trailer was on top of two cars. We also heard that two separate accidents were being cleared.

Suddenly, cars ahead of us began creeping forward. People jumped in their cars and immediately began trying to make up for lost time, As the two long lines of vehicles picked up a little speed, some people began weaving through traffic in truly reckless ways. I felt that another accident could happen at any second.

Eventually the traffic resumed normal speed and spread out. We ran into another traffic jam at our exit from the interstate, but we were only 15 minutes late for the meeting. We finally had lunch about 5 PM, and we were ready for it.

This evening after we got home, I read in the news that a tractor trailer and one car were involved. No one was killed, but one person was life-flighted to Louisville and another was taken to a local hospital. I hope they are both going to be all right. It was certainly a bad accident, but not as bad as we had heard. Isaac and I were both relieved that the rumors along the roadway were wrong.