If hubris is the sin of the gods, did this weekend make me a divine fool? (#SFWApro)

As you may have noticed, I didn’t post any time-travel reviews (or anything else) this weekend. And thereby hangs a tail …

This week was Culture Quest, a Mensa quiz competition. For several years I’ve played with friends in South Carolina and stayed a couple of days after (this year I had to forgo that for work). So Saturday I headed down that way. We hadn’t put a charger for our phones in the car since we got the new one so I decided I wouldn’t turn on the maps on my cell phone until I hit South Carolina. I might need it then, but up to that point I should be fine: after all I checked the route online ahead of time and it was simple (US-15 and keep going south). I could handle that.

Not so much. I’m not quite sure where I went wrong but apparently at one of the points where the road divided (US 15 one direction, US 1 or whatever the other) I wound up on US-15’s backwoods cousin. I noticed that everything seemed different from when I drove down three or four years back but hey, I was still on US-15 so I must be misremembering that it was a big, fast road and not a small, slow-moving country road. And sure it was odd I didn’t remember any of these small towns, but like I said, memory’s fallible.

Fortunately I got a text checking how soon I’d be there so I pulled off the road to check GPS. Funny, it insisted I was already in South Carolina and much further from Greenville than seemed possible … eventually it sunk in the GPS was right. I was well east of Greenville and actually south.

I notified my friends I’d be late and recalibrated. From that point it seemed simple enough … but as I came up 395 N to Greenville, barely 10 miles away, I hit a solid block of traffic. Moving at maybe 1.5 miles an hour. And about 1.5 miles of traffic jam. You do the math.

Apparently there’d been a bad accident so a stretch of highway was closed, diverting traffic onto the roads near Fountain Inn, then back on the highway. After that, everything got back to normal and I made the short remaining distance in record time.

I had a great weekend (more tomorrow) but I’m glad to be back home with TYG and the pups (Joyce, if you’re reading, sorry time was too short to stop by). Reviews will come some time this week.