Driving Redux; or, That Was Really a Bit Disappointing.

So, thanks to all of your helpful advice (and thank you muchly for it!), suzimoses and I decided to go from Mountain View across to 880, and take that up to the Richmond - San Rafael bridge. And we decided that leaving at 5:00 was perhaps not enough, and that maybe we wanted to leave at 4:30, to give us three and a half hours before the 8:00 show. After all, it was raining a bit.

The area leading up to Dunbarton bridge was rather messy; I should have taken tenacious_snail's advice and taken 237, probably, but it didn't make that much difference.

880 was surprisingly clear. Even through the maze (I took the left-hand path, taking 880 up to it, rather than the 980-580 jaunt) wasn't bad -- maybe a quarter-mile of backup before the merge. 80 to the bridge was packed but not too slow. And so we got to 101 at San Rafael at about 6:30, for an 8:00 concert.

I thought this was plenty of time.

I had failed to reckon with San Antonio creek.

So, a little north of San Rafael, we hit 5 MPH stop-and-go traffic. And, figuring that it couldn't be that bad, and not having a map for the figuring of alternate routes anyway, we waited in it. And continued to wait. For two hours, during which we traveled about seven miles.

Then we discovered why we had been waiting; the traffic merged down to a single lane, and proceeded in single slow file through a fifty-foot-wide stretch of five-inch-deep water flowing rather quickly across the road. (Don't try this at home; this was very much the sort of thing where the only reason it was safe was that we could follow the car in front of us and see that there were no unexpected deep spots. And there were a couple of cars on the other side of the road that had veered too far to one side and were now a foot deep in the water.) After getting through that, we merged with all the traffic from the other direction that the police officers were directing to make a U-turn at the edge of the water.

Things were pretty uneventful after that, at least comparatively, and we rushed into the theater at about 9:40, just in time to pick up our tickets at the remains of Will-Call and hear the second half of the finale, and the encore. Which was quite fantastic, as the Jazz at Lincoln Center orchestra usually is.

And then we headed home. After getting a map, on grounds that 101 was almost certainly still closed. The trip home was quicker, by a bit -- we took 101 south to 116 east at Petaluma (noting that 101 was closed due to flooding at that point), then found that 116 was closed due to flooding at Frates Road, and so took Frates road around to Adobe to where it rejoined 116, and then took that to the intersection of 12 and 121 outside Sonoma (and there noted that my alternate plan of taking 12 all the way down from Santa Rosa wouldn't have worked, as 12 was closed heading away that interchange), and then took 121 uneventfully to 37, and 37 back west towards 101, with a final detour along Atherton Ave to account for westbound 37 being closed due to flooding. Oh, and when we finally got to 101, we discovered that that interchange was the southbound end of where it was closed.

From there, things were again uneventful, and by the time we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge -- which, I will note, starts to look like a vast unsettling Ayn-Randian industrialism monument at night in a bit of fog and rain and lit from below by sodium-vapor lights -- the rain had largely stopped and things were mostly pretty dry.

And we finally got home, nine hours and ten minutes after we left. I'm still glad we went, and the bit of music that we did get to hear was quite fantastic, but I really do wish we'd been able to hear rather more of it!

Whee, adventures.

Driving Redux; or, That Was Really a Bit Disappointing.

So, thanks to all of your helpful advice (and thank you muchly for it!), suzimoses and I decided to go from Mountain View across to 880, and take that up to the Richmond - San Rafael bridge. And we decided that leaving at 5:00 was perhaps not enough, and that maybe we wanted to leave at 4:30, to give us three and a half hours before the 8:00 show. After all, it was raining a bit.

The area leading up to Dunbarton bridge was rather messy; I should have taken tenacious_snail's advice and taken 237, probably, but it didn't make that much difference.

880 was surprisingly clear. Even through the maze (I took the left-hand path, taking 880 up to it, rather than the 980-580 jaunt) wasn't bad -- maybe a quarter-mile of backup before the merge. 80 to the bridge was packed but not too slow. And so we got to 101 at San Rafael at about 6:30, for an 8:00 concert.

I thought this was plenty of time.

I had failed to reckon with San Antonio creek.

So, a little north of San Rafael, we hit 5 MPH stop-and-go traffic. And, figuring that it couldn't be that bad, and not having a map for the figuring of alternate routes anyway, we waited in it. And continued to wait. For two hours, during which we traveled about seven miles.

Then we discovered why we had been waiting; the traffic merged down to a single lane, and proceeded in single slow file through a fifty-foot-wide stretch of five-inch-deep water flowing rather quickly across the road. (Don't try this at home; this was very much the sort of thing where the only reason it was safe was that we could follow the car in front of us and see that there were no unexpected deep spots. And there were a couple of cars on the other side of the road that had veered too far to one side and were now a foot deep in the water.) After getting through that, we merged with all the traffic from the other direction that the police officers were directing to make a U-turn at the edge of the water.

Things were pretty uneventful after that, at least comparatively, and we rushed into the theater at about 9:40, just in time to pick up our tickets at the remains of Will-Call and hear the second half of the finale, and the encore. Which was quite fantastic, as the Jazz at Lincoln Center orchestra usually is.

And then we headed home. After getting a map, on grounds that 101 was almost certainly still closed. The trip home was quicker, by a bit -- we took 101 south to 116 east at Petaluma (noting that 101 was closed due to flooding at that point), then found that 116 was closed due to flooding at Frates Road, and so took Frates road around to Adobe to where it rejoined 116, and then took that to the intersection of 12 and 121 outside Sonoma (and there noted that my alternate plan of taking 12 all the way down from Santa Rosa wouldn't have worked, as 12 was closed heading away that interchange), and then took 121 uneventfully to 37, and 37 back west towards 101, with a final detour along Atherton Ave to account for westbound 37 being closed due to flooding. Oh, and when we finally got to 101, we discovered that that interchange was the southbound end of where it was closed.

From there, things were again uneventful, and by the time we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge -- which, I will note, starts to look like a vast unsettling Ayn-Randian industrialism monument at night in a bit of fog and rain and lit from below by sodium-vapor lights -- the rain had largely stopped and things were mostly pretty dry.

And we finally got home, nine hours and ten minutes after we left. I'm still glad we went, and the bit of music that we did get to hear was quite fantastic, but I really do wish we'd been able to hear rather more of it!

Whee, adventures.