\u201cDo you want to try the HOV lane this time?\u201d Trudy asked.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve been thru this before. To HOV or not to HOV? Even though we\u2019ve been two or three people in the car \u2014 a veritable high-occupancy \u2014 it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
I grumbled something about not knowing. But then a sign appeared. High above the roadway. With clear rows and unambiguous words: HOV 2+ FREE.<\/p>\n
We decided to merge into the fast lane.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
We win! We were thinking. And then, a funny thing happened.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But\u2026 but\u2026 we didn\u2019t 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n Incredulous at our failure, at my failure as a navigator, I murmured something like, \u201cOh well, I guess we\u2019re going home on highway 290.”<\/p>\n Let\u2019s just say, that in all my years of coming and going between Austin and Houston, I\u2019ve never taken the highway 290 route. From the side of Austin where we live, you\u2019d never do such a thing. You\u2019d end up on the wrong side of town when you got home.<\/p>\n The wrong side of town. That\u2019s where we were headed.<\/p>\n There was however, one upside. You see, there\u2019s this gas station just outside of Brenham on highway 290 that serves hand-dipped Blue Bell ice cream<\/em>. And OMG how long has it been since we\u2019ve sunk our teeth into a cold scoop of Blue Bell.<\/p>\n Oh well, we\u2019d just have to make a stop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cDo you want to try the HOV lane this time?\u201d 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\u2019ve been thru this before. To HOV or not to HOV? Even though we\u2019ve been two or three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3898"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3898"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3905,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3898\/revisions\/3905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}