Travels Through Virginia 2:

- It's a lot of fun for me to see peculiarly German-heavy menus in restaurants over here. Take the Capital Ale House, for example. Want a curry wurst? You've got it. A true "Bavarian" pretzel? Yours -- and you can even get it stuffed with a wurst. Scan down the menu, find a dish involving your favorite German sausage, then cheek the beer list and pair it off with the right beer. It's actually pretty cool.

- Cally's in Harrisonburg is another "oh so German it kind of hurts aua" restaurant. The beer menu has a fairly nice selection, which I enjoyed sampling over lunch on Wednesday. The Koelsch I had no use for whatsoever, but then again, I already know that I hate Koelsch. The Downtown Amber was adequate, but not great, but the Munich Lager (very malty), Belgian White and Smokin' Scottish, in increasing order of preference, were fantastic. Very good stuff, particularly the last.

- Now for a (hopefully epic) gripe: It's all well and good to have an AM radio station devoted to giving drivers traffic updates on the major thoroughfares in Hampton Roads, but can someone please find a way to boost the signal strength? It doesn't do much good to have the station if you can always locate the nearest tower simply by passing a tractor-trailer and seeing whether the signal fades even more; even at it's best, the signal is about 85% static.

Not only that, but could someone at VDOT get eyes on all of the major choke points? On Thursday, at around 2 pm, we were bombing through Hampton on the way back to Virginia Beach. I had the useless AM update on, and listened to it four times through. There were updates for 64W, 264 in both directions, 58W, and 664N. Note the omissions: 64E and 664S.

So we head on towards the tunnel, thinking we'll be ok, when we round a bend and ... come to a dead stop at LaSalle Avenue, a bit over 5 miles out from the tunnel. I mean a dead STOP. It took an hour to get to the next exit, so that we could get off, turn around, and try 664.

664 was moving nicely, until we get bout 4.5 miles out from the tunnel, when we slam down to a near-stop. It was stop-and-go for a while, but unlike the corresponding route on 64, there was an element of 'go.' Still don't know the cause of this one; the stoppage at the 64 tunnel was a broken-down vehicle inside the tube that somehow managed to block both lanes (good going, dude).

Nor were we in the clear once we crossed the James River. We looped around to the end of 64, and hopped back on that route headed west through Suffolk and Chesapeake. The high-rise drawbridge over the southern branch of the Elizabeth River in Chesapeake? Breakdown on the bridge, left lane blocked.

Got past that one, only to spot the mobile traffic alert signs posted at the side of the interstate, advertising an accident 64W at Indian River Road. Our exit. Three left lanes blocked. Fantastic. So we got off onto the secondary roads, since we were close enough by now that I could do so with confidence. It took some time from there, of course, what with a few dozen traffic lights to negotiate and all, and God only knows how many thousands of extra "holiday weekend" travelers.

There was a light note, finally. It wasn't the pissed-off hungry baby in the backseat who, much to my surprise, had been confined to her carseat for four hours plus by this point (and all for a two-hour drive -- go figure); we did manage to get her fed, fortunately, and she calmed down. It was the flock of Canada geese that brought traffic across all three lanes of Greenbrier Parkway South to a dead standstill when they decided to take a casual stroll across the road. At least I was the lead car in my lane for that one, so I got to see and appreciate and laugh at what was going on; I may not have been so jolly about it were I four cars back wondering what the #$%^ was going on now.

The byline for the last leg of our drive: what should have been 21 miles turned into 3h20m. I didn't think to check the odometer to get a glance at the mileage of the actual route, but I know it was at least double when all was said and done -- not that that helps much.

So please, VDOT, get a better transmitter, and get some accurate traffic information out there in a timely fashion. It may not have changed much, but if I'd have known how screwed I was in both directions, I'd have gotten off and hung out somewhere for a while, ridden it out (hey, I've done it on 95 before).