Today I had a horrid commute. I do not even have to think back over the years to see if another one even comes close. This was the worst commute to work that I have ever had.

It all started at about 2 in the morning when a big-rig carrying frozen chicken tipped over on the wet roadway at the base of the Altamont in Livermore. The truck was blocking two of the four lanes of 580 which caused backups on all the routes leading from the Central Valley into the Bay Area.

By the time I left for work all the routes were packed and I decided to stay on the main route as my traffic app said it was only going to be about 10 minutes longer than the alternate routes.

Unfortunately, they started to clean up the accident once it was daylight and blocked another lane which caused the already slow traffic to come to a crawl. I am not sure why it took them hours to get another truck to start offloading the chicken.

Then after offloading the chicken they blocked all lanes for about 20-30 minutes while bringing the truck back to an upright position. You can see in the picture above that people were getting out of their cars and walking around. We were in sight of the accident so could see what the cause of the stoppage was.

They finally opened one lane and traffic started moving again. Then I was soon flying toward work. Finally after four hours of travel I made it to work in time to go to lunch.

Going home did not take as long, but was not fun. There were periods of heavy rain and there was also lightning flashing across the sky and rumbles of thunder. Near the top of the Altamont the ground was covered by hail. I am glad that I was a bit behind the storm so that I did not have to drive through the hail.

Here you can see the heavy rain that was still in the area during the evening. Luckily it cleared off so that I could take a nice long walk and get my steps for the day.

Even though the rain caused a lot of havoc with traffic today, I am thankful for it. We received several inches of rain that will start to help relieve our drought conditions.

I will end the post with a picture that I took this morning before I left home. The beautiful color of my Mister Lincoln rose really makes the raindrops stand out.

I always like Raindrops on Roses.

I hope that you had a better commute than I did today 🙂

Steven