En-route entertainment - break out the popcorn!

We often sit in it and even though it brings no pleasure at all there is mostly nothing we can do but continue to sit there, in the traffic!


Please, all you clever scientifical people out there – all the rocket scientists, levitation specialists and people with more brain than they know what to do with…I’d even go for time travel…make something that can get me where I am going without the headache of having to wait!!! A rocket powered time-sled pulled by beautiful Nubian princesses, now we’re talking!

This definitely reminds me of an earlier post of mine, (A passion for the open road – chips the cones…) the traffic part, not the Nubians.

The GoodWife and I went off to Johannesburg to the wedding of a really good friend of mine, TheGough. Johannesburg, or JoBurg to the locals is about 450km (280mi) from our little house and is a far cry from the beautifully serene plot that we call home. The concrete fingers tickle the smog-laced sky and the cars are pumped around a network of black veins. This city is sick though. It has high cholesterol and its veins and arteries are clogged. The lifeblood of this bustling metropolis is being forced to a standstill as red flags are waved to warn you as you approach the road maintenance crews. The JoBurg city council has invested something silly like R510 million into the upgrading and widening of the highways around the city in lew of the upcoming 2010 World Cup to be held in South Africa.

FANTASTIC!!! I’m all for improvement, but the poor sods that have to sit in the jams while they are happening are the ones likely to have the coronaries!

On our way home after a fantastic weekend we were on one of the two four lane highways that merge to form one six-lane highway out of the city. This Gillooly’s interchange is a nightmare at the best of times. Now, however, with those six lanes down to just two the nightmare becomes mind altering!
As we inched (literally) our way out of the city, people in the cars beside us became the objects of some serious amusement! I saw a man pick his nose and then try and flick the gremlin out the window while his wife was preoccupied in the back seat trying to breastfeed a screaming newborn. So many children with their faces glazed to the window burning furrows into the tar with their stares. And then, the pièce-de-rèsistance – the moment I thought I would just park the car where it stood and walk the 450km home because it would be way faster, I saw it. It was a sign, and like an oasis in the desert it shone and sparkled in the distance. It was nestled on the grass verge between the two directions of the highway up ahead. It was a fantastical sign of rather epic proportions fifteen feet across and about ten feet high, mounted on a trailer with its own generator to operate the thousands of tiny lights that would illuminate in a predetermined pattern to spell out its message.

Then I felt it creep up on me it started with a little tickle in my belly and before I knew it, it had built into a humungous chortle that guffawed from my face. My laugh caught the attention of the man in the truck next to me. He followed the line of my pointed finger to the same sign and he too started chuckle. And so the laughter spread through the few cars within eyeshot of the sign.


Well… this is what it said:

In bright orange letters the sign warned us:



ROADWORKS AHEAD…SLOW DOWN!