Syzdekistan

Right now, I am a Wildlife Conference in Tucson. Getting to the airport for my early morning flight was a pain. First of all, I had to stop by my office to pick up some papers I was bringing to the meeting. I had left them neatly stacked on my desk and forgot them. It was pouring down rain when I left the house and my route to work had the gutter side lane covered with water. I tried to make a left to take another route and never got a turn light. After three cycles, I continued down the flooded street. Luckily at 05:30 AM there is little traffic. Another road to my office was closed overnight due to construction so I had to detour through Downtown Las Vegas.

Even though traffic was light, I hit every light red and had to trip each sensor to get a green. I think they do this overnight in Las Vegas to keep people from cruising down the arterials at 70 miles an hour. It’s hard to speed when you have to stop every quarter mile. It’s annoying as hell though, to drive down a six lane road and all the intersections are showing red in every direction.
Anyway, I grabbed my items from my desk and got back on the road. At 06:00, the rain had stopped and it should be a quick trip down I-15 to the airport for my 07:20 flight. Wrong. I got on at D Street and I-15 was a parking lot. It was clear when I passed under it at Charleston so I knew the blockage was either new or close by. After a few minutes of crawling in traffic, it was apparent it wasn’t a new accident. Nevada Department of Transportation had a bunch of their trucks blocking the US-95 north exit and forcing all the traffic into the left two lanes of I-15. Several tow trucks were pulling a smashed 18-wheeler from the gore area at the US-95 exit.

The rest of I-15 was smooth sailing. It had stopped raining and it was strange to see the big colorful hotels on the Strip sticking up through a broken layer of low clouds. I got off at Tropicana, made good time down to Swenson and then turned on Russell to go to the economy lot. The economy parking wasn’t there on Russell like it used to be. Well, actually, it hadn’t moved but Russell road had been rerouted around the lot. How come I wasn’t notified? So I park the car, wait for the shuttle, go check in my bag (late check in by now — it was 45 minutes to my flight). The lines at security were thankfully short but I got pulled aside and hand-wanded and then given a pat down. I got to the gate 5 minutes before boarding began.

If 5 or 10 more things would have gone wrong, I would have missed my flight.