Sept. 18, 2002 ~ Under construction
Our town is small, with a population of less than 5,000 people. There are a couple of highways running through town -- one has two lanes, one has four. There are... let me count... a total of seven stop-lights here. So what are the odds that pretty much the whole town would be under construction at the same time? Slim to none, right? And yet, the main highway, for the entire length of the town, is torn up. They're widening it a little, but not so much that it will really matter. The existing lanes will be a little wider, and they're doing work on the utilities under the road, but that's it. In the meantime, the four lanes have been reduced to two. The project is expected to take three years. We could probably handle this okay, except that they're also tearing up the other highway, resurfacing it. That highway runs through the town square, and the rerouting of that road is actually putting some people out of business. In addition, the sidewalks on the square are all being torn up and redone, and utility work is being done there, too. THAT would be enough, but for reasons known only to the powers that be, they are also doing underground utility work on the county roads AND on some of the town's major streets. Every time we find an alternate route, they start working on that, too! So it's pretty strange, driving here. This is a little bitty country town, and no one would ever expect it to be such a mess.
But we are trying to be positive and cheerful about it (most of the time, anyway), because we might as well. What would be the point in griping about something for three years? After the initial griping, hopefully we have it all out of our systems, and we can just look forward to the day when everything is more or less fixed.
Did I mention that the highway from our town to the nearby larger town is ALSO under construction? That's been going on for so long that I can't remember a time when it was a normal road.
But if all this is our worst problem, I guess we don't have much to complain about, do we?
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