Massive Traffic Jam and a Real Mystery

 

We finally were able to leave Tampa yesterday and head north toward the mountains.  It’s 560 mile trip so it’s a two day trip for us.

We are settled into a wonderful little campground in south Georgia.  It was 99 degrees when we got here.  We will have to deal with Atlanta traffic this morning, but then it’s a pretty smooth ride up into the mountains.

Heavy rains delayed our departure, but we finally got on the road about 11am.

My friend messaged me about 7am that I 75 north had been closed due to an accident.  We didn’t think much about it since it was 4 hours later when we left.  It was just a few days before when the same stretch was closed due to a crazy man shooting at a police officer.

We hadn’t gotten more than about 40 miles when traffic came to a complete stop.  We finally started to inch along a few feet at a time, but mostly we were stopped.  It was raining pretty hard.   There were no exits on that stretch of the interstate so nobody could go anywhere.  We waited, and waited, and waited.   We have a computer program that hooks up to the engine and it was telling us the transmission was getting pretty warm.  The dash temperature gauge also was reading higher but not exactly matching the computer program.  We didn’t know which system to believe but in either case we were a little concerned.  The engine temperature was find. We finally decided to pull over and shut down the engine for awhile.  We weren’t going anywhere anyway.  By the time we started moving it was 1:30 and we hadn’t gone very far at all.

WE came upon the accident scene and all we saw was a red vehicle that looked like it had rolled over a few times.  We never were able to find out anymore about what happened. 

Once the interstate started to flow we made decent time, only stopping for bathroom breaks for Al and the kitties. When we stop, we make a habit of getting out and walking around the coach and truck to make sure all is well.  I got out and did the walk around and noticed the coiled blue electrical cord that connects the coach to the truck, was stretched out and had been dragging on the ground.  It was badly frayed, but still connected at both ends, and surprisingly was still working.  In doing some checking this morning, I discovered it is not cheap.  What a surprise, right?

We patched the cord with some duct tape.  When we attached it yesterday morning, it was tight and no way it would drag on the ground.  We are baffled about how it got stretched out enough to drag on the ground.    Any ideas? 

The ONLY thing I could think of is maybe when sitting in stalled traffic for those hours, the sun warmed it enough to let it stretch out?   That doesn’t really make sense though, but it was the only thing I could think of.  It’s a pretty heavy duty cord.  At any rate, we will need to replace it.

It was a bit of a stressful day.  Hopefully today will be a little smoother.