Well, and now here I come, hippity-hop over hill and dale, spreading joy and all those amusing little folksy tidbits of mine you've all so grown to love, let's have a picnic! (By the way, special thanks to PJ O'Connell of Eastham, MA., for nominating the word/words “hippity-hop” for inclusion in this week's extravaganza, and for correctly sensing that it/they would indeed add the precise amount of extra “zest” that this opening paragraph had lacked up until then.)
Fine. Well. So. The big story this week of course (or one of them, anyway) being the recent absence of rotary at the bridge.
Now, probably this may shock some of you, as I know that in general most of my readership prides itself on its inability to travel past Hyannis (and only that far during emergencies, and even then you have to multi-task like a son of a bitch to prevent having to go back there ever), so you may not know this, but for the past fairly lengthy time period, they've been digging around down there by the bridge, and apparently what ended up happening is that someone stole the damn rotary.
Or at least that's how it appeared to me the last time I drove to Boston, and got over the bridge and -whoa! -no rotary at all! Did you hear about this? Absolutely missing. And on the one hand, I can't imagine how someone could pull that off, but on the other, well, I saw the digging; I mean, for months I saw the digging, but I never once asked anyone about it or tried to report it or anything. Which is just another example of how apathetic we've become as a nation, myself in particular -I'm obviously part of the problem.
I haven't seen anything about it in the papers, but I can't imagine I'm the only one that's noticed. I mean, it is kind of glaring. You can tell someone's embarrassed about it, because it's still kind of a mess, with just a bunch of those little cones kind of scattered around for no particular reason.
It does turn out, however, that there is a real upside to its disappearance, in that you can drive over the bridge way faster now. In fact, if you get a good head start, you can just race over that thing. It's like this great roller coaster now, where if you really go like hell on the way up the bridge, you can actually get airborne as you fly over the hill, sometimes for as long as two or three hundred yards! Of course, you'll go a lot higher and further the faster you go on your approach, sooo, don't spare the spark plugs!
Actually, it seemed to affect my driving time between Boston and Eastham much more drastically than I had figured. I used to always allow two hours to go to Boston, but my business (which, as you might imagine, is basically low-end thievery) took me to Somerville, which always added another three hours (both ways. It took me a long time and much bitter experience to learn how incredibly long it takes to get from Boston to Somerville; no matter how tricky you try to get about it, and despite the fact that Boston and Somerville are almost right next to each other, it's still three hours.) (Lovely drive, though.) (And all the shopping!)
So I was pretty surprised that now that the rotary's been disappeared, the trip takes about 35 minutes, one way. Of course, that's driving as fast as I can, really late at night. My car (it's a late model Buick LeBaron)'s speedometer goes up to, I think, 140, and it was totally pinned; by the time we landed from the jump on the bridge on the way back, we were almost in Mashpee! So, I don't know exactly how fast I was going, but we got in to Kelp Manor maybe a little more than 35 minutes after leaving Johnny D's.
Anyway, a big thumbs up for not having a rotary -you're gonna love it!
