Road Warrior

A few days ago I returned to Madison, Wisconsin, a city I lived in for over a decade. There's an armful of topics I could write about after being there, and after a day or so of sobering thought, I've declined to write about any of it. The emotional part of the trip is all mine, and not something I'm inclined to share with others I don't know.

What I would like to write about, however, is the traffic in Madison. Now, Madison is by no means a gargantuan city. It is not Chicago. It is not New York. It is not San Francisco. Hell, at under 225,000 people, it's not even Milwaukee. However, living there for eleven years, I guess I just got used to the hustle and bustle of the traffic. I got used to it taking me 20-40 minutes to go to and get back from wherever it was I wanted to go. I got used to thinking in terms of "consolidation" trips - ie. "I'm going to be on that side of town anyway, so what else could I pick up?" I got used to the fact that once I took the Madison exit off of the interstate, I still had a twenty-five minute drive to my house.

I got used to all of it over eleven years and never realized it.

Okay, so we leave last September and move to a new location in Northern Wisconsin - population >10K. Where I live now, it takes LITERARLLY three minutes to drive from one end of the town to the other. The amount of stoplights in my town is probably the amount of stoplights that are on State Street in Madison.

Anyway, I hadn't thought about this much since I left last Fall - your reality is relative and all that - but visiting Madison a few days ago I was SHOCKED at how ANNOYED I as with the traffic. Talk about becoming a country bumpkin. And when I speak of traffic, I'm not being annoyed with the other drivers - I'm being annoyed with the sheer number of stoplights. I'm being annoyed with the sheer distance one has to drive to get from point A to point B. I'm being annoyed with things that are not "incident" relavent, I'm dealing with things that are "size" relevant. Madison has a great road system, and they're always improving it. I'm saying that it wouldn't matter what city I went to - after returning and living in my little burg for a while, I can't believe I put up with it, and I have no urge to return to it whatsoever.

Now if I can just persuade my wife to let me buy that compound in the hills....