*ahem* Sorry about the title, but when you read that a truck carrying 60,000 pounds of meat flipped over and burst into flames, it comes to mind.
I hope the driver pulls through.
The accident shut down the 5 freeway for most of the day Thursday. We were fine since we drove down yesterday, but a lot of people coming from the LA/OC area or farther north — including my parents, a lot of panel guests, and the driver with all those copies of Comic Book Tattoo — were stuck in the traffic jam for hours. It took us about 2 hours yesterday, including navigating the downtown streets to find our hotel during rush hour. My parents, coming from roughly the same distance today, made the drive in 6½ hours.
The problem is there just isn’t another way to get from there to here. Between Anaheim and Oceanside, there’s only one route inland, the Ortega Highway, and it’s a twisty little mountain road. And there’s miles and miles of freeway bordered on one side by the ocean and the other by Camp Pendleton. Naturally, it was in the middle of that stretch that the accident happened.
(Link via aeryncrichton)
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Yeah, it was true gridlock. At one point we covered something like 30 miles in 4-1/2 hours. UGH! I hear (from the LA Times Comic Con Blog) that Dakota Fanning was in the same traffic jam. I wonder if she was in that limo? LOL! Anyway, it’s the kind of thing that really reminds you that there are just no alternatives when you’re driving from Los Angeles to San Diego! I actually had about a minute to decide whether or not to grab the Ortega Hwy, but I’m not familiar with it, and didn’t have enough information to realize how bad this accident was. I hope the copies of Comic Book Tattoo make it today!