My retirement journey has brought my wife and me to the Dallas-Fort Worth Mega-Metroplex, where we now call home.
This enables us to see family members who live in the Hill Country without having to drive damn near half a day to get there; by “half a day,” I mean it took us nine to 10 hours at times to drive there from the Panhandle.
The route from Princeton to Dripping Springs/Austin is much more direct. There is a big “however” I need to attach to that.
However, it also is a good bit more harrowing than our Amarillo-Dripping Springs/Austin jaunts. You see, our route takes us along Interstate 35 from Dallas to Austin, at which point we take a sharp turn west along U.S. 290, enabling us to cruise — more or less — into Dripping Springs.
We just completed a round-trip visit with family folks. The trip home was, shall we say, bracing.
I-35, as I have known for many years, is a virtual free-for-all. Traffic was thick all the way from south Austin until , nearing Dallas, we turned off I-35E and headed east for a bit along I-20; we then resumed our northbound trip along I-45.
This traffic flow will take some time for me to get used to it. What’s the answer? Is there a remedy?
Hah! Texas continues to grow rapidly. The Hill Country region is among the state’s high-growth regions. Austin’s population may have passed the 1 million-people mark. It’s exploding down yonder in the People’s Republic of Austin.
There was talk some years ago about building a bullet-train track from Houston to DFW, or from Austin to DFW. Then we had that discussion about that monstrous highway from Laredo all the way to the Red River; that talk dissipated when the cost of invoking eminent domain on all that privately held land became known. The state couldn’t afford to buy all that land from landowners.
Whatever. The traffic problem is only going to worsen in the immediate future as more folks move into Texas and hit the highway from the Metroplex to the Hill Country and beyond.
The traffic flow along that Interstate 35 racetrack has gained one more vehicle, the one my wife and I use when we hit the highway. There will be many millions more to come … for certain.
John Kanelis, former editorial page editor for the Amarillo Globe-News and the Beaumont Enterprise, is also a former blogger for Panhandle PBS in Amarillo. He is now retired, but still writing. Kanelis can be contacted via Twitter @jkanelis, on Facebook, or his blog, www.highplainsblogger.com.Kanelis' blog for KETR, "Piece of Mind," presents his views, and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of KETR, its staff, or its members.
Kanelis lives in Princeton with his wife, Kathy.
