Road Work

There are two season in Michigan: winter and construction.  And this construction season is hitting the Lansing area hard.  I can’t seem to go anywhere without encountering some kind of traffic obstruction or orange cones or earth moving equipment.  Of course, Lansing's not the only Michigan town hit hard by the season; we drove to Canton last weekend to do some IKEA shopping (because sometimes you just need something fun and cheap from Scandinavia) and there were orange cones everywhere.  I didn’t even have to look outside the car to know we were in Construction Central; our GPS told us:

I’d never seen a grouping of construction warnings on the screen like that before.  Until Saturday, when we drove to Flint to pick up my Mom from the airport:

The screen is zoomed out a bit so the cluster of orange is more pronounced, but still, that is a dang lot of construction. 

Complaining ensued, until we remembered these roads that we traveled in July:

Of course, I don't live there.  I live here in Michigan, where the DOT hasn't met a stretch of asphalt it didn’t think it could improve by covering the surrounding area with orange cones, re-routing traffic and parking all sorts of heavy equipment on the lanes formerly used by road warriors.

But remembering the roads we bumped along on in Kenya does shine a new light on things.  When our van got stuck in the mud over there, I remember saying, “I will never complain about Michigan’s roads again!”  So much for that.

So today, when I’m crawling along the stretch of road that’s been torn up since May, I will say a prayer of thanks because one day the road will be fixed, all the cones will be gone and I will, once again, be able to fly by on my way to wherever it is I’m going.  

Until next Construction Season, of course.

A few seconds I shot of the "road" we took on the way into Kiserian.