Survival Skills in a Traffic Jam

Last Wednesday around 16:00 an enormous snow storm hit North Holland bringing down an amazing 10 centimetres of snow.  In great panic the working masses ran for their cars to get home as fast as possible to avoid being trapped driving in this horrific snow storm.  Many of those people would spend the next 5-8+ hours of their lives stuck on the highways… I was one of them.

So in many countries 10 cm of snow is nothing to panic over but here in the Netherlands this little snow fall close to rush hour created pure grid-lock on the highways around Amsterdam and the main highway going north of Amsterdam.

When my manager told me that a snow storm was coming I really didn’t believe him because it was still somewhat sunny outside.  But true to how fast weather can change in the Netherlands, it was snowing within half an hour.  Around this time my manager told everyone to go home.

I checked traffic and I could already see that there was a huge traffic jam.  But I figured better to sit in it now and get home at a relatively decent time rather than sit in it later.  This was actually good logic since as it turned out the roads would be jammed until 1:30am that evening.  But I did not count on having to sit in traffic for 5 ½ hours.

I live 25km from work and normally it takes me about 30min to get home.  I would have never believed that it was possible to take over 5 hours to drive that distance.  I probably could have walked it in the same amount of time. A colleague who lived 10km further than me took 7 hours to get home that evening.

Now 5-6hours sitting in a car is a long time, especially when you are unable to take a break.  I am a bit health conscious and therefore drink a lot of water and herbal teas, but this health tendency does not combine well with being a woman trapped in the middle of the highway with hundreds of other cars.  Sitting there in my second hour seriously considering just urinating on my car seat I looked longingly at the men stepping out of their cars just going on the side on the road.

Then I thought of this story that I read a couple of weeks ago about this hard-core woman journalist who went to the war-zone in Afghanistan when she was over 4-months pregnant.  On one of the tours they were driving through areas where it was impossible to stop for safety reasons.  Being so pregnant, her little one was seriously pressing up against her bladder.  So what did she do?  She began to pee into water bottles inside the car and then tossing them outside.  My main question when reading this was: how did she aim?

Well, I felt inspired (and very desperate).  Looking over to my passenger seat I looked at my empty Tupperware lunch container and thought, if she could do it so can I.  Well it turns out aiming is not so easy…especially when you are still driving. While I was able to get some relief, in the end I had a little stage fright especially with the big trucks driving next to me, who could probably suspect what I was up to.  But these extreme circumstances called for extreme measures.

In the end I had to stop at Ikea (along with many other people it turns out) which was about half way between work and home. I have never appreciated Ikea (and their long opening times) as much as I did that night.  After that the next two hours (and 10km) home did not seem as bad.

 It is now Sunday, and it is snowing again.  But today next to Paul and a warm fire (and a bathroom in the next room) I can really enjoy it.