wildyams

My drive home tonight was a perfect example of why I hate living in Hollywood. As I was leaving the lot, I got into the lane to turn left onto Lankershim and head towards the 101 South. Well, mysteriously traffic was so backed up on Lankershim that only one car at a time was able to make the left turn throughout the entire duration of a green light. Since I was in the left hand lane, I couldn't very well turn right without illegally cutting across two other backed-up lanes of traffic, so I was forced to wait through about 3 green lights till I could pull onto Lankershim. Since the flow of traffic there was about maybe as third as fast as I can walk, I decided to make a U-turn at the first available spot. Because that was about a half a block up, it only took me 2 or 3 minutes to get there and then I flipped the U. I went back the other way looking to make a left off Lankershim because I heard on the radio that there was an accident on the 101 South at the Highland offramp, and since the whole world gets off the 101 South at Highland, clearly this is what was causing the traffic; so I figured I would take Laurel Canyon over the hill, stop in at Greenblatts for dinner and take surface streets home (my only other option would have been to go across Toluca Lake and Burbank along Forest Lawn and then around Griffith's Park and go up Los Feliz to get into Hollywood, and that would have been a really, really long way around).

So anyway, getting over to Laurel Canyon required a lot of odd manuvering, and having to make turns away from where I was trying to get to so that I could avoid sitting in a 30 to 40 car line waiting to make a left, but after maybe 10 minutes or so, I made it onto the freeway and then exited at Laurel Canyon. Shockingly :roll there was a ton of traffic just sitting on Laurel Canyon, waiting to make it's way up and over the hill just as I was. I figured it might clear up once I got across Ventura Blvd, but when it didn't I decided to just try to drive random surface streets up into the hills to see if any of them actually made it over the hill, or if any of them came close. After about a minute or two of that, I'd already gone down two dead end streets, and seriously considered taking the Forest Lawn - Los Feliz way home, but I finally found something that let me continue up the hill. Well after driving around for another 10 minutes doing that (other cars appeared to be doing the same thing), I got dumped back out on Laurel Canyon, but was a lot further up the hill, but I couldn't really tell if I'd saved time by taking the random streets, or if I would have been better off just sitting in the traffic. I told myself that at least roaming the hills was more fun than inching along and called it even. Speaking of inching along, since I was back on Laurel Canyon, that is exactly what I did. For the next 15-20 minutes all the way till I got down to where Laurel Canyon intersected Hollywood, and there I made a left and went to Greenblatt's. After picking up food, getting home was relatively easy and took only about 10-15 minutes (this may have been due to the fact that by this time it was getting to be about 8 pm, I don't know).

In any event, this is a perfect example of how my ride home (which usually takes no more than 15 minutes, even in slow-moving traffic) became a grueling ordeal which took over an hour, all because of an accident that happened far enough away from me that I probably never got within 4 miles of it at any point; all thanks to the fact that Hollywood is a miserable mess of cars and way too many people living near each other. It's stuff like this that really makes me wish I lived in a place like the one I visted in Alaska 3 years ago, which probably had less than 100 people inhabiting 100 square miles. :nono