We just got home from spending literally hours stuck in the worst traffic jam I have ever seen in my entire life.

We were on our way to the military base to go grocery shopping, a 30-45 minute drive from home. We took a different route from usual as I wanted to photograph a Burger King I had seen before, which had a huge picture of the king draped on it, except the king’s portrait had been removed (perhaps somebody thought it was insulting). Suddenly traffic slowed to a crawl; turned out a big truck had died in middle of the highway. Then, when we thought we were clear of all that, about three miles from the base, the traffic came to a halt. We and everybody else were trying to get on frontage roads, but those too were gridlocked. It was simply unbelievable – cars (including us) trying to go in one direction, only to have to turn around in the middle of other cars and head into the oncoming traffic because the road was blocked; two huge trucks scraped each other because a tanker couldn’t make the tight turn, and they became locked together (so no cars could get past them); angry motorists leaning on their horns (a lot of good that did since nobody could move anyway).

Then we saw it – a gasoline tanker had hit a pickup and jack-knifed on the highway, so the road was closed (except hundreds of cars, including us, were right there), teams putting retardant on the road, police everywhere, an enormous crane to tow the tanker away, which it finally managed to after several tries. This of course could have happened anywhere, but with the terrible way people drive here, it had to have been a thousand times worse. And I was just waiting for the tanker to explode. What a nightmare.

Message is clear, posted earlier: