Mr and Mrs Magoo drive to Boston

So, on the last Tuesday in June we set off for Boston by car for a family Batmitzvah. We had planned to sleep in downtown Chicago overnight to avoid the morning rush-hour traffic. As we left our driveway at about 3 pm, both Mr and Mrs M. Simultaneously realized that we could get a head start on the trip by driving right though Chicago and sleeping somewhere in Ohio. This we did, after struggling though the evening rush hour traffic out of Chicago.

The next morning we set off bright and early. We stopped for an awful breakfast/lunch in some nameless and characterless decaying industrial city. This was unusual - we almost always can identify great little places to eat. It may have been an omen.
I do most of the driving, keeping Mrs. M in reserve for my drowsy time. I was getting tired, so she took over shortly after lunch.

We were tootling (its a word - look it up) along the New York State Thruway (sic) listening to a set of lectures on tape about ancient Greek History when suddenly traffic came to an almost screeching halt near Syracuse, New York. It took about 30 minutes to get to the off ramp to discover what was the problem. The Thruway was closed from Syracuse to Schenectady (about 120 miles) due to flooding. An inquiry at the toll booth confirmed that US 20 which runs almost parallel to the Thruway was also impassable. "Go South" we were advised, so we set off down I-81. Soon we came upon a sign that said that I-81 was closed from Exit 4 to the Pennsylvania border, and closed in Pennsylvania all the way to Wilkes-Barre (pronounced very oddly as Wilksbury).

No problem. Mr and Mrs M. headed up I-88 in the hope that we could get to rejoin the Thruway near Albany. About 32 miles in, near a town called Sidney, we came to yet another closure. The local gendarme directing traffic was not very helpful about where we should head. "Find a motel and sleep until its over" was his best advice. "The road ahead is washed away and two truckers died trying to get through".
Hmmm. Sidney - we have friends there - oops, that's in Australia, and its spelled differently. We were not that lost. A quick consult with a map gave us hope that we could go back down I-88 and take New York State Route 17 to I-84. SR-17 had to be open because it went though the mountains past Catskill State Park, where we used to camp in the summer. Nothing to flood there. I-84 became a magnet - we had used it many times before.

It was about this time that Mrs. M. called our oldest daughter and was given the comforting thought that we sounded like Mr and Mrs Magoo bumbling around the USA. This sympathetic comment came from a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who specialized in Geriatric Care.
Anyhow, we retreated back down I-88 to SR-17, and found that it too was closed, with no passable bypasses around the closure.
Undeterred, we headed back down I-81 trying to get to I-84. We found that the previously closed section was now open and we took I-84 to Newburgh and tried to find a hotel. More hmmm -- hotels were a tad full - 200,000 people had been evacuated from Wilkes-Barre and Port Jervis, and some of them had opted for hotels rather than the public spaces that the authorities suggested.

We finally ended up in Fishkill, New York at 11pm.
All in all, our trip was only about 200 miles and 5 hours longer than it should have been - but time passes slowly for the Magoos.