It's The Most Wonderful Traffic of the Year

Ah, Miami. Great weather, never ending interesting people and things going on, and awful traffic.

When I moved here, in 1979, the worst thing about the place was the crime. It was truly out of control. The drug dealers were killing each other off so rapidly that the medical examiner couldn't keep all the corpses -- they had to rent refrigerator cars. And then, in 1980, the Mariel boatlift brought even MORE criminals...

My friends from NY used to call and ask if I wasn't afraid. I wasn't, since crime wasn't too much of an issue on the UM campus or the other places I hung out.

Well, the drug dealers are in Mexico now, and the Marielitos who were bad have been caught and imprisoned (and the good ones have largely assimilated --Dr. Barry has had several sterling residents who were part of that wave), and crime here is down to 1960s levels. There are the occasional incidents, of course, but few of us are affected like we were in the 80s and 90s...

No, the current scourge is traffic. I'm used to thinking you can get to, say, Hollywood from South Dade in 30 minutes. Ha. As if. Now I have to leave more than an hour.

D1 hates it as well. Her commute from Brickell to FIU (solamente 30 minutos de Sweet Home Hialeah) can take well over an hour, even though it's fewer than 10 miles away.

But not this week! School is out, and many offices close this week. I drove D1 to MIA this am, and it took less than 20 minutes, on a blissfully fast moving Palmetto and Dolphin.

We sighed. Cars SHOULD be able to move. It was lovely.

D1 is off to Atlanta, where the traffic is even worse than here. She's spending the night with her boyfriend's family in Buckhead, and then they're all driving to Evansville, Indiana. I'm told there's not much traffic in Evansville.

I'm at the office, looking over a few papers.

And then home, with mercifully NO rush hour. Ah, the holidays...