Anyone ever embark on a trip to accomplish some travel goal and have an unexpected closure gum things up?
Happened to me twice today. I'd been planning my trip to finish crossing all the still-open-to-traffic Ohio River bridges. I needed all of them except the I-376 and I-79 crossings. Got to Neville Island and found that the easternmost crossing back to PA 65 was closed for painting. However, I decided to walk around the barricades and the fencing and crossed it on foot, so it counts. Also, I decided to finish my clinch of US 522 on this trip. Just south of McConnellsburg, the road is closed for a bridge replacement. I drove right up to the point of closure on both ends and followed the marked detour, so I count it (did the same to US 131 in Michigan a few years ago, and US 27 in Indiana as well).
I'm in Culpeper tonight. I just gotta finish the drive to Powhatan, and I'll have 522 clinched in its entirety.
(Hopefully, most of you will get the thread title reference.)
Yeah, most notably my first two attempts to cross the Bayonne Bridge. Had to wait for the new deck to open.
Marty Moose! :bigass:
It's not a vacation. It's a quest. A quest for clinches.
I once tried to clinch US/MN-65 from Des Moines to its northern terminus in Littlefork, MN, but at the time there was a closure and detour on the mainline that prevented me from getting the northernmost ~15 miles; a bridge was being replaced, IIRC.
I do what HB does when riding alone but cannot do this when traveling on vacation...
Had to take a 7 mile detour on US 4 in New York for a bridge closure (was able to go back separately and get that one).
Just the other week I had to detour off US 224 in Indiana for a railroad crossing repair (didn't know this until after I returned home why the road was closed) leaving me 19 miles short of finishing it to US 24 so that I can fully clinch US 224 with a self-drive east of Akron. I cannot get to Indiana on a self-drive trip so that is aggravating.
Just went through Yellowstone. Buffalo got in the way. Six times. And we didn't even get to see a moose lol.
Southbound lanes on the I-82 bridge over the Columbia River was closed. Had to take a detour on US12 and US730.
NatGeo had a show a couple weeks ago that was broadcast live from Yellowstone. They showed the bison jams.
This is a big bump but this just happened to me.
On Wednesday, my parents and I were leaving Muscle Shoals, AL to get me back to Nashville for my flight back to OKC. We wanted to take the Wilson Dam bridge so I could view the river from the dam. But, as soon as we got off the exit, there were signs saying the dam crossing was closed. There's a 9 month long project slated to begin soon that will re-deck the bridge. So, no dam on this trip (or likely when I go back late in the spring).
The funny part of this thread is that this happened to me with PA 851 the day before the original post. Well it was partly my fault for planning this trip at the last minute. I was able to finish that clinch back on January 12, 2019.
This was also the case technically with US 220 BUS (Roanoke) and US 211 BUS (Luray), but I was able to see both closures via a slight clinch. (The former is a little more debatable, but I still drove to the spot of the closure on it.)
When I did my US-24 end-to-end trip in April 2015, my only planned stop or detour was to drive to the top of Pike's Peak outside of Colorado Springs. The upper half of the road was still closed due to snow.
October 2017: Planned to drive from Crescent City to Redding, CA via US101 and CA-299. CA-299 was closed due to wildfire damage, so we had to go back north into Oregon on US199 then take I-5 south as a detour.
January 2019: Planned to clinch I-59, but they closed it in downtown Birmingham that week. Now I have a clinch of I-459 instead.
Not a full scale vacation, but on one Saturday in June of 1993, I drove down to the Edaville Railroad in Carver for a model train show/flea market that had been advertised locally. Got there to find the parking lot (where the show/flea market was going to be held) empty. Ran into a couple of my buddies that had also shown up, who informed me that the organizers of the event had called Edaville and cancelled it on Friday afternoon. Sidebar: To this day, I can never listen to Wilson Phillips' Give it Up (which played on my car stereo at one point driving down Route 24) without thinking of that morning.
Had to do a small divert on US-68 in Ohio two years ago. They were doing some road work, so I got around it by using OH 508, T-188, and T-30 north of West Liberty
My trip out west last fall was supposed to include Glacier NP, but an early-season blizzard cut that short. Arches NP and Bonneville were a nice consolation prize.