While the total eclipse in Tennessee on the morning of August 21, 2017, was one of the most extraordinary moments of my life, the drive back to Ohio afterward was one of the most hellish experiences of my life. We all knew that there were going to be traffic issues due to the millions of people driving into the path of the eclipse, but I don’t know if anyone could have predicted the mess it actually turned into. My friend Travis and I spent 11 hours trying to out smart the hoards of people trying to escape like ourselves, but we were thwarted at every turn until the bitter end.
Immediately following the conclusion of totality, Travis suggested that we hit the road and my response was that we had two options:
- Leave immediately and try to beat the get ahead of everyone else
- Wait a few hours and see if the mess clears itself up before we get on the road ourselves
(Spoiler Alert: It didn’t matter which option we chose above…) We opted to leave as soon as possible, which appeared to surprise our hosts, but Travis had been on the road for the past week and seemed eager to get home.
It didn’t take long before we realized how bad things were going to be. Our path to 65 N in Millersville passed-over the interstate itself and it was already bumper-to-bumper heading north for as far as the eye could see. When we got into town, we started looking at our maps app and noticed that 31 E which ran parallel to 65 N was clear sailing far enough north to get ahead of the traffic jam, thus began our quest to get ahead of the traffic jam.
You can see in the map below that our entire trip amounted to just that: getting ahead of the traffic jam by driving the back roads. Unfortunately, we weren’t the only people with this idea! Every time we got close to an on-ramp of 65 N, whatever road we were on would grind to an agonizing halt. No matter how quickly we were sailing along, BAM!!! Near the border of Kentucky, we took an aggressive path and decided to head towards Glasgow and see if taking a huge chunk out of 65 N would help, but it didn’t matter.
I likened the experience to a zombie movie. You know how the heroes in zombie movies and running around trying to find an escape and at every corner they’re met by slow moving zombies completely blocking their paths? That’s exactly how this went. No matter how far off the beaten path we seemed to think we were getting, there they were, miles and miles of cars backed-up blocking our path.
When we arrived at the Cumberland Parkway west of Glasgow, we made a decision to simply take Route 31 all the way up to Elizabethtown and get on 65 N there. It looked clear and we had to imagine that by the time we got there, which would be about six hours after we started, things would have to have calmed down. On the way there, somewhere around Magnolia, I noticed that my central vision was compromised and I quickly realized I was going to get hit with a migraine. The stress and the sunlight had done its damage. I was exhausted and aggravated, and now I was going to have to deal with a migraine, but the worst traffic was yet to come.
We filled-up the gas tank and took a bathroom break outside of Hodgenville and discussed what we were going to do. My inclination was to continue on 31 E and connect with 9002 E so we could get on 75 N in Lexington. I simply had a bad feeling about 65 N going through Louisville. Ultimately, we decided to stop playing games, to bit the proverbial bullet, to deal with whatever traffic we had to deal with and get on 65 N in Elizabethtown.
Route 61 to the on-ramp was fast and clear, then about two miles out from the juncture with 61 N, at approximately 7:30 PM, we met the most agonizing traffic jam I’ve ever had to deal with. Keep in mind, everyone is trying to get on 65 N. Not a single person is trying to go south toward Nashville. That’s where everyone is coming from. So, the best thing to do is to just get in the right lane of the road and deal with it. But, no… there are always plenty of assholes who want to drive past all the hundreds and hundreds of people trying to do the same thing they are and cut in line.
That’s why major traffic jams happen, because people think they’re special and think they should get to cut in line, and everyone else can go fuck themselves.
The jam was made especially bad because of a traffic light where Route 1031 met the road we were on. As we grew near the intersection, people started passing on the right berm trying to merge ahead into the right lane! All common decency had broken down and then you had this intersection where people treated red, yellow and green lights quite arbitrarily. At one point, a guy in a moving truck who was just trying to get through the intersection got out and started directing traffic because nobody would allow it to remain clear enough to get through. It was a waking nightmare.
The worst part of this jam was when we got through all of this and arrived at the on-ramp to 65 N. It was now past 10 PM, but we’d finally made it to the on-ramp to 65 N, the interstate we’d avoided for eight hours…. AND IT WAS CLOSED!!! Yeah, the on-ramp to 65 N had a barricade indicating it was closed and to take the detour, but there was no indication as to what that detour amounted to! Now, I’ve known Travis for around twenty years. He never gets upset. He literally laughs in the face of trouble and frustration. He lost it. Travis lost it. So you know I was beside myself.
It’s beyond my ability to explain it, but the detour required us to go through three of the four loops in the cloverleaf juncture in order to get onto 65 N. This wasn’t as bad as it sounds because by this point, there were no more assholes driving to the front to slow things down, just the traffic on 65 N. The whole way through it, though, Travis and I cannot get over how ridiculous it all is. How could they do this?!? Why not have that on-ramp open for this event?!? Anyway, once we got through it, 65 N was okay except for when we got near other on-ramps and things slowed-down.
I’ve been going on for a while here and am getting a bit tired of recalling this nightmare. To summarize the rest of the trip, we decided to get around Louisville by taking the 265 loop, but before it merged with 71 N we noticed traffic jams on the road and tried once again to get around it by taking back roads. Travis took over the driving because the previous nine hours of driving, along with the migraine, had utterly drained me. This was probably more stressful for me because I was letting a person, who’d never driven it before, drive MY car through strange back country roads in the dark. And after we went through ALL of that trouble and got back to 71 N, it was a fucking parking lot.
We’d lost.
The last two hours on 71 N and 75 N was stop-and-go at times. It just wouldn’t end. I did navigate around the 71 N/75 N traffic jam by going through Verona, and navigated around the 75 N jam over the bridge in Cincinnati by taking the 275 to 471 loop. But those were minor victories after an entire day of getting our asses handed to us.
We arrived at Travis’ home at 2 AM. We’d started at 2:15 PM central time, which meant the entire trip, which would’ve taken 4 hours in idea conditions, had just taken us about 11 hours to complete.
We hung-out for a little while, drinking a beer and chasing it with bourbon, trying to recall the fact that we’d just seen a total solar eclipse. It was honestly hard for me to remember. That being said, the parts that I could remember made it an easy call: I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat to see that eclipse again.
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