Wednesday November 23rd 2022

It rain a little overnight. The showers I heard were very light and short. This morning it was close to being a foggy morning. The cloud deck was very close to ground level and remained there for most of the morning. In the early afternoon the sun broke through for a very short reminder of a sunny day. It wasn’t long before the sky darkened and a gentle mist dampened everything. The temperature peaked in the mid seventies.

I made the mistake of leaving the RV resort this afternoon. The traffic rapidly reminded me that it was the day before Thanksgiving. Traffic on the US route that passes the front of the park was the worst I’ve ever seen it. The was a steady line of traffic in both directions. In front of the park traffic was moving at normal speeds, but less than a mile up the road the traffic thickened and slowed to ten to fifteen MPH. As I drove along the road, it looked like the traffic in the other direction was even slower. The parking lot for the Publix supermarket appeared full with more cars turning into the shopping center all the time.

I didn’t have any particular destination, but chose to stop at the Home Depot. My intent was more to turn around than to go shopping, but I went inside to kill time. I hoped that time would allow the traffic level to drop. The Christmas decorations for sale in the Home Depot were impressive. They had a complete selection of inflatables and plenty of fake trees. It would be easy for someone decorating their home for the first time to spend a thousand or more dollars on decorations and not be done.

The other seasonal indicator was the presence of black plastic covered displays in the aisles around the store. They were clearly getting ready for Black Friday sales and didn’t want people getting into them before the start of the sale. I have no idea what was hiding under the plastic.

Traffic hadn’t improved when I got back into it heading home. My average speed over most of the eight miles home was around ten MPH. My guess is the traffic on Interstate 4 was worse and people switched to my route as an alternative. It was a primary way south and west from Orlando before the Interstate.