“Do you want to try the HOV lane this time?” Trudy asked.
She was behind the wheel. I was navigating. We were high-tailing it as fast as we could out of Houston, trying to beat rush hour.
We’ve been thru this before. To HOV or not to HOV? Even though we’ve been two or three people in the car — a veritable high-occupancy — it’s never been absolutely clear to us that the HOV lanes are indeed free, anymore, combined in places as they are with toll lanes and TxDOT-quality signage.
I grumbled something about not knowing. But then a sign appeared. High above the roadway. With clear rows and unambiguous words: HOV 2+ FREE.
We decided to merge into the fast lane.
And so there we were, sailing along between the concrete barricades passing the slowing afternoon traffic. As rush hour was beginning to condense, it was all Trudy could do to keep our speed to 65 miles per hour, even as the cars in front of her began to pull away.
We win! We were thinking. And then, a funny thing happened.
The HOV lane rose up and began to curve to the north. The concrete walls squeezed in, and the traffic slowed. We were coming to a park-and-ride, not a surprise, I suppose, but the puzzling thing was that the signs only gave us two choices: exit into the park-and-ride or continue around the tightly turning roadway on the HOV lane to FM 1960.
But… but… we didn’t want to go north. We wanted to go west. You know: west, like the HOV lane had just been doing five minutes ago. But no. We were beginning to realize that this was not the Katy Freeway HOV. And now having passed the park-and-ride, there was no exit until the far northwest side of Houston.
Incredulous at our failure, at my failure as a navigator, I murmured something like, “Oh well, I guess we’re going home on highway 290.”
Let’s just say, that in all my years of coming and going between Austin and Houston, I’ve never taken the highway 290 route. From the side of Austin where we live, you’d never do such a thing. You’d end up on the wrong side of town when you got home.
The wrong side of town. That’s where we were headed.
There was however, one upside. You see, there’s this gas station just outside of Brenham on highway 290 that serves hand-dipped Blue Bell ice cream. And OMG how long has it been since we’ve sunk our teeth into a cold scoop of Blue Bell.
Oh well, we’d just have to make a stop.