Gonna Rant now.
We have definitely entered the dreaded construction season here in Grand Junction.
Took me 45 minutes to get mom to the airport, but, only 30 minutes to get home ... it's literally 5 miles away. There is like 6 ways for me to get out of my neighborhood.
Three of them are in various stages of chip seal. If you've never experienced this (Grand Junction was my first rodeo), there is basically 10 steps as far as I can tell. None of these are good for your vehicle. And virtually every road in Grand Junction gets this process every year.
1) Clean the streets with a convoy of street cleaners
2) put down little plastic markers for lanes)
3) fill in any cracks with tar
4) lay down oil
5) spread chips of rock on the street
6) allow vehicular traffic to push the rocks firmly into the oil and level it somewhat
7) sweep up excess rock
8) fog seal (more oil)
9) re stripe
10) remove little plastic markers (this seems to be optional, because sometimes you just see them forever)
Two of the other routes are being repaved. When the roads get poor enough that chip sealing won't improve them, they repave, then next year the asphalt gets "protected" with chip seal.
And the last route is getting new utilities sunk into it, which of course means either repaving, or patching and chip sealing is in it's future.
One would think that maybe the right hand would talk to the left hand and maybe, just maybe give residents [B]ONE[/B] route out of the construction zone that is unmolested at any time.
I get that this "needs" to be done, but, when the economy was not so hot in 2012-2017 (we got the worst a little later than the rest of the country), there was very little of this and the roads just got done like every two to three years. Oh well, Like my Dad used to say, "Every coin has two, or three, or four ... sides". Dad may not of been the sharpest tool in the shed, but, he had some good old common sense, and was prolific with his opinions :AGGHH:.
Okay, rant over ... :D
