The trains might occasionally have been delayed and took a whole lot longer to travel via than the car, but at least you could sit back and relax, catch a snooze or read a book – not sit with gritted feet in backed up traffic! This was the wonderful prospect that greeted me this morning as I embarked on my second trip into the CT office following the start of my brand spanking new work schedule this week that sees me in the CT office on Mondays and Fridays and in the GB office (read “man room”) on Tuesdays to Thursdays.
As always I was up and about just after 05:10 this morning and was all packed and in my car at 05:45, ready to tackle the 50km long trek into Cape Town via the N2. Everything was plain sailing and I was making perfectly normal time until I hit the outskirts of the city and the wheels just came flying off. Traffic viciously slowed to crawl and as the busses and taxis continued flying past us hapless single occupant cars in the specially reserved bus lanes, I could do little but sit back and gnash my teeth in frustration.
Anyone that knows me knows that I don’t mind driving at all – but I do mind sitting in traffic, a particular bane that I suspect is probably not all that unique to me. Anyway, as I sat there grinding my molars to bloody stumps, I heard on the radio that there had been an accident on the N2 just before the Raapenberg off ramp. Forty five minutes of agonizingly slow creeping forward later, I finally came across the accident ‘site’ – some idiot had clipped the back of a rubble truck trailer and had ended up blocking all of the lanes, but looking at the damage, certainly not badly enough to have snarled up traffic as badly as what it had! Bloody rubberneckers!
By that stage though I was already breaking out beads of cold sweat because slap bang in the middle of my epic crawl, the bloody indicator light for my coolant system had started flashing, meaning that imminent doom could have been fast approaching. As it is, under my ever watchful, furtive eye, the temperature gauge stayed fairly constant and I managed to limp in to the safety of middle campus where I could pull off and check out the diminished water level.
Predictably the reservoir was as empty as jar of money left behind at a parliamentary gathering, meaning that without a shadow of a doubt, I must have developed a slow leak in the system then. Just what I need – another headache.
Stupid cars and stupid traffic. Give me a high-speed, maglev train to Cape Town any day!
(only because as much as I enjoy the train system, Metrorail’s outdated train sets are just too slooooowwww)