Detour, Detour

It never fails--if I'm running late, the world seems to conspire to make me even later! Mondays are very tightly scheduled, with just enough time to squeeze a quick errand in (usually picking up some produce at Berkeley Bowl), but I didn't end up having time to shop today.

On the way to M's fencing class, we got stuck behind a sloooooow car for ages (two-lane road, no passing allowed, speed limit 50 mph). Once we reached the next town, the road opens up a bit (two lanes in each direction), so I thought we were set, until we reached the scene of a major accident that completely blocked the road. They waved us off to the north, and I assumed I could just follow the other cars to get back on the road. (I was driving the Saturn today, and we keep the Thomas Guide map in the other car.) But no, the traffic started peeling off in all directions, and I ended up spending 10 minutes wandering through El Sobrante before finally giving up and backtracking to the (closed) main road. This time, as I crossed the road, I did the sensible thing and rolled down my window to ask the flagger how to get back onto the road. Fortunately, the southern detour was quite obvious (a zillion cars on a narrow street), and we made it to fencing class only 10 minutes late.

This was 10 minutes of the 20 minutes allotted for the Berkeley Bowl stop, so I decided to go ahead and get gas at Costco (just down the road from the fencing school), and proceed straight to B's ballet class. When we arrived at the ballet school, we parked on the east side, as usual. The school is in the middle of a block, accessed by a path running east-west across the block. We got to the sidewalk to find our second detour of the day: the path is closed for construction, so we had to walk around the block and in through the basement. We'll find out now if DH checks his voice mail, because I left him a heads-up message so he'd know where to park when he picks her up.