A Trip to the Airport

On Thursday night I had to head to the airport to pick up KJ. His flight was supposed to be in at about 4pm, so I was planning on leaving about 15 minutes before that to make what should have been a 20 minute drive to the airport. At about 3:30, an enormous storm hit Melbourne. The lightning seemed to be almost nonstop and the rain was so heavy that I was soaked to the bone just from running from the building to my car 10 metres away. I had to drive in that. There was so much water streaming down and sitting on the road that for the 10km of highway I drove on in the pelting rain, I could barely see a thing. Traffic was crawling along at about half the speed limit and every time a truck passed by, visibility was reduced to pretty much nothing.

10km’s up the highway, the traffic came to a halt and I spent the next hour creeping inch by inch towards the airport. I thought that when I got to the airport everything would be ok, but a tree had fallen onto a car on the road that passes the airport exit, so the police were diverting all traffic through the airport. It took me another 10 minutes just to get in, and even longer to get out.


All in all what should have been an hour round trip ended up taking about three hours. It spins me out that some people drive to and from work in traffic like this every day. How can they stand it?! It’s just wasted time. You can’t do anything constructive, because you have to pay attention to the constant creeping forwards. And all to travel a distance that should take less than half the time! Your job would have to be seriously rewarding for you to want to waste 2-3 hours a day in transit. Either that or you would have to be paid well enough to justify sacrificing that much personal time in order to get to work.

Personally, my limit for travel is about 35 minutes in either direction. Any further than that and I can’t imagine it being worth it. Maybe it’s my laziness talking, but if I had to get up for work more than 2 hours before I started, I can’t imagine I’d last long in that job.