Tikkabik

So Robert and I were supposed to go into Boston today for a checkup at a doctor's office in town, but we never made it.

We usually need about two, two and a half hours to get into Boston to the doctor's office from our house, sometimes a bit more. It's more than an hour's drive to get to the Quincy Adams MBTA stop, which has a large enough parking garage that -- more importantly -- has a high enough ceiling that we can actually park our van there (it needs 7 feet 6 inches of clearance). From there, Robert and I take the Red Line to Downtown Crossing, change for an Orange Line train, take that two stops, and bingo -- we're a block away from the doctor's office.

Today we got a late start -- we left the house with a little less than two hours to get there, so I was already worried. But I was relieved when we got near the highway entrance, and I didn't see any traffic heading westbound, towards one of the two bridges that takes you off Cape Cod.

A moment later I realized that I'd mistaken a lack of traffic for a lack of motion in the traffic that was there. Looking at the overpass, I was actually staring at the top edge of a bunch of car roofs. Standing still.

I checked with the cell phone SmarTraveler service that keeps track of traffic in the Boston area, and they confirmed that there were huge backups getting off Cape and other backups heading north, too. Looks like a lot of people just decided to take a long weekend on the Cape and were heading back home today.

Now, when we made the appointment -- months ago -- it hadn't struck me that maybe it was a bad idea to drive into Boston the day after Independence Day weekend. But it turns out that it's a veritable parking lot.

So I called and cancelled the appointment, which hopefully we can reschedule before too long.