We made yet another trek south from the mountains to the gulf, leaving Blacksburg for #2 son's home near Tampa. We ended up driving on the Friday before Christmas (again, not my choice but it meant #3 son could come with us, leaving #1 son and his wife in town due to jobs).
Bottom line of the trip is that Santa needs to bring South Carolina some additional traffic lanes.
I opted for the "quicker" almost all-interstate route this time -- 81-77-26-95-10-U.S. 301-75 to get here, with one twist that almost worked. Most of it wasn't bad except I-95 in South Carolina.
The twist was to avoid I-77 north of Charlotte. Going home after Thanksgiving, we passed miles of stopped traffic in the southbound lanes due to an all-lane shut down on one of the last bridges over Lake Norman from a bad wreck. I expected no less for this trip, so worked to avoid it. At the bottom of Fancy Gap Mountain, we took I-74 east, then U.S. 52 through Winston-Salem and on to Lexington. Other than some 55 MPH speed limits around parts of the city and an adventure in lane shifts in whatever massive construction is going on north of I-40, the plan worked. U.S. 52 is an interstate-quality four-lane highway and there wasn't much traffic, so that part went well. Getting on I-85 was seamless and the multiple lanes had traffic flowing quite well -- almost. Just as we got into the construction zone where the road dropped to two lanes, traffic just about came to a standstill and we crept the the whole zone until it ended near Concord. Seems North Carolina drivers can't travel on two lanes without running into each other. The wreck at the far end of the construction had things backed up for miles. Other than that, though, I believe my plan worked since it didn't take any longer and we avoided the usual mess of getting through Statesville and the traffic that starts to get heavy around Mooresville on 77.
From there, travel wasn't too bad for a while. I'm still trying to figure out the odd milling of the asphalt around Columbia though. It looks like the whole highway was milled, but then someone in SCDOT had second thoughts and had random strips of asphalt laid down over parts of the lanes. Once on I-26 it was OK, since all the construction is done and all three lanes are open -- except until we got close to I-95. Eight miles from the junction, traffic started to crawl. We inched along from there to get on 95, then joined a massive clump of traffic heading south. We went from crawling to actually getting close to the speed limit to standing still. There wasn't really anything showing on Waze like a bad wreck or anything, it was just a large collection of people who can't drive. As we moved down the highway, we would come across someone in the left lane passing someone in the right lane at a 1 MPH difference. When they finally got past they steadfastly stuck to the left lane even if there was room to move right. It was like their attitude was "I'm not getting out of this lane for anything." That led to a lot of jockeying as people worked to gauge how much room there was in the right lane to get around the blocker without getting stuck behind someone else in the right lane going below the speed limit. This went on all the way to the state line and magically disappeared when the highway expanded from two lanes to three.
From there the trip was uneventful, other than the long string of up and down speed limits from Baldwin to Ocala on 301. It would be nice if there were a better route across the state other than I-4 (I've done that at night a couple of times and didn't care to do it again).
Return date hasn't been set yet, but I'm considering going further up I-95 to eventually pick up I-74 as a way to totally avoid Charlotte. It may be longer mileage-wise, but getting stuck in traffic around Charlotte kills any kind of time advantage for any route that goes that way.
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VDOT has its variable speed limits signs in operation on I-77 in the fog and weather area around Fancy Gap. They are LED signs, much like those that are showing up in front of businesses these days. The sign displays a black and white image of a speed limit sign and can be changed remotely to a lower speed than 65 depending on weather conditions. The new signs are part of a safety upgrade (to a place that already had message boards, lots of reflectors, and other things to handle poor visibility) that came after the massive Easter Sunday wrecks a few years ago.
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Bruce in Blacksburg
