I Wonder As I Wander

We spent a very long two days in the car coming home last week. We usually have music, an audio book and a podcast or two to pass the time. Occasionally we talk to each other. But I still find time to ponder the little oddities I notice along the way.

For instance, we stopped at a McDonald's for our mid-morning rest break. The parking lot was filled with cars, so many that I was worried there'd be a long line for the ladies' room. But when we got inside, there were two people at one table, two more in line at the counter, and no one in the bathroom. I could see three employees, and maybe one or two more were out of sight, but that didn't account for even half of the cars in the lot. So where did they all come from?

There were no other work sites that could have needed overflow parking. This road had a couple of gas stations and seven fast food places and none of their parking was full. Was this some kind of park-and-go area? Maybe, but why would all the cars be clustered near the front?

This kept me busy until we crossed over a highway and I saw five or six cars, most of them with police lights flashing, blocking the road in both directions. There was no other traffic in sight. Suddenly my husband said, "There's a sniper!" I nearly got whiplash looking around. But we had passed it. Then my husband said he'd seen a police sniper on the side of the overpass. He'd only gotten a glimpse of him between two cars.

Later we were able to look up the incident. It turns out that some guy had run his truck into a ditch on the site of the road and announced he had a bomb. The standoff lasted seven hours and we had come along right in the middle.

Immediately I started wondering about the situation.  And what caught my imagination wasn't what was possibly going on back there, but what the GPS on my phone would make of it. It's wonderful that it warns me of upcoming speed traps. Not that I ever speed (hahaha), but it's nice to know that the cars ahead of me are soon going to be slamming on their brakes.

And when I'm stuck in traffic that seems to have been backed up for hours, it's nice to know that there is construction up ahead, or that an accident is being cleared away. But what would my phone say in the above situation?

SNIPER! probably wasn't enough information.

BOMB THREAT AHEAD could cause wholesale panic as people tried to make U-turns and get away.

DON'TEVEN THINK ABOUTEXITING HERE ... maybe.

I think the most useful would be GET DOWN ON THE FLOOR AND DRIVE AS FAST AS YOU CAN!

Then again, by the time I'd read all that, I would have passed it.