12/7/08

Given that I only had to work for four hours today and that the traffic over the George Washington Bridge and through the Bronx never as much as slowed down, of course my directions would have to be wrong. I don't think I've ever gone over that bridge without at least seeing a few cars backed up at the toll booths. Today I breezed right on through. Since I had no real parking options along the way, I decided to roll the dice and head straight to the consignee. I gambled on them being closed for the weekend, since I couldn't see a 24/7 type of operation getting such a tiny shipment by truckload. If they were in fact closed, then only a locked gate could rain on my parade.

My directions said that I needed to take I-190 to Exit 4. Okay. No problem there. Then I was to proceed west on Shrewsbury Street. Uh, no. The exit only went to the east and I had the choice of going north or south on MA-12. I chose north, thinking I must need to make a left on Shrewsbury to follow my directions. Uh, no. There was no Shrewsbury Street. Massachusetts being Massachusetts, I never did manage to find a place to pull over and check my map. It was one skinny road after another as I wandered along. I would just have to go with my gut and follow the signage to find my way out of an uncomfortable situation. I followed MA-12 north and veered left on MA-140. This took me back to I-190, so at least I made a lucky call on that one.

Back on the freeway, I hit the button to have my Qualcomm unit read my directions to me one more time. Yep, I heard it right the first time. I-190 to Exit 4, west on Shrewsbury. Maybe I would have better luck approaching the exit from the other direction. Nope. Same deal. The exit only went to the east and took me to MA-12. Since I already knew that going north would do me no good, I tried going south. Nope. No Shrewsbury down there either. I hung a right on Mountain Street, since I had seen a sign on the highway indicating that Exit 3 would be for 'Mountain St / Holden.' I knew that I needed to get to the west side of the freeway. I knew that I was going to Holden. Any decent sized street would have to do at that point.

Mountain Street did get me to the west side of the freeway and eventually wound its way around to Shrewsbury Street. I hung a left and crossed my fingers. From there I caught MA-122A up to the industrial park, just like my directions said that I would. Go figure. I found that my customer did have some room for me to back up to the docks and they are closed for the weekend. There's some good news. I went to maps.live.com and did a postmortem on the routing fiasco. From Exit 4, about the only way to get here would be the way that I eventually did get here (down to Mountain and across the freeway). Shrewsbury doesn't appear to cross the freeway and the other roads to the north of Exit 4 were way too tight for a big truck. Exit 2 would have been the correct one to take, but whatever. I didn't hit anything and I had plenty of time for a little Sunday drive. No harm, no foul.

I have a nice fast connection here so I've been enjoying a pretty good battle between the Cowboys and Steelers. Then my 'Skins are playing tonight, although I haven't found a video stream of that one yet. I'll be empty with a boatload of hours available in the morning. Maybe next week can provide more than 1,825 miles for me. Maybe.