You Can't Get There From Here: There are four levels of summer road construction in Michigan: bad, really bad, absolutely bloody impossible, and never mind I'll just walk. Dexter, pop. ~5000, has just reached the absolutely bloody impossible level. At one nearby intersection they have closed the entrances to the freeway and redirected everyone about a mile or two in the opposite direction to a different entrance. Unfortunately, for a couple of days, there was a different construction project going on the freeway itself. As a result, people suffered long delays before being detoured off in the opposite direction to a freeway entrance that was effectively a parking lot.

Clever me, I use the back roads to avoid the freeway, ever since a fifteen minute highway trip began to take three-quarters of an hour. Of course, today I discover that a stretch of back road, which was closed last year to be fixed (but only ended up more mangled), was closed again and traffic was redirected right into the backed up overflow traffic from the above mentioned freeway detour.

Good grief.

The scary part is that although they really don't do a terribly good jobs of traffic management, they do an excellent job of long-range forecasting. For instance, around here we all know that the current construction is going to take "several months" to complete. When they are done, after a brief respite to allow everyone to drive unimpeded on the icy winter roads, the current detour is up for repair and the current construction area becomes the new detour.

It shall be 2004 before I can get anywhere.