Being in LA for a little over a year now I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of the area and the roads, not all the highways but I can usually get from point A to point B.

I’m generally pretty vocal about the traffic in this area and last weekend’s trip to Vegas put me right over the top. With no traffic it takes about 4.5hrs to drive from LA to Las Vegas (and vice versa). Tay and I left LA around 3:15pm on Friday to meet up with some friends from Raleigh. We left early to help with traffic because last time I went we left at 5:30pm and it took 6.5hrs.

How long did it take to drive to Vegas you ask? 6.5hrs… again. We hit brutal traffic at 3 spots in the trip. But that wasn’t even the worst part. The drive back took 10hrs.

Here’s what happened on the way back

We left Vegas at 2:15pm after lunch at the MGM. Traffic was immediately bumper to bumper so we stopped at the outlet stores in Primm (it’s the first town with casinos on the way to Vegas ) to see if it would lighten up. We walked around for a while, gambled a little more, and 2hrs later we left.

Traffic hadn’t lightened up at all… not a happy camper, but what are ya gonna do right? There’s really only 1 way to get from Vegas to LA. So we sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic until we hit Barstow (the halfway point) which is a little over 120 miles from Vegas.

There are very few exits on this road, there was no accident, no reason at all for there to be traffic; I couldn’t make sense of it… until we got to the source of the traffic. The California Agriculture Checkpoint (they check cars for dangerous Nevada carrots) – which looks like a giant toll booth and they never stop anyone at it. So essentially it’s there to create a 120 mile traffic jam every Sunday. I don’t think I’ve ever been more angry at California than I was when I realized that the stupid checkpoint was the reason I had been sitting in traffic for 8hrs.

We stopped once more in Victorville to get some caffeine and  pulled back into Santa Monica just past midnight, completely exhausted.

The Vegas trip was great, but traffic was the worst; we could have flown in from Boston faster.

So the official list of places I’m not driving to anymore stands at:

• Hollywood (an hour to go 10miles? Come on…)
• Las Vegas

The blacklist is of course voided if family is visiting. I think I might just fly to Vegas next time.

Posted on okaytim.com