Detour
Route 220, the heavily traveled main drag between Rocky Mount and Roanoke, has more than its share of road-blocking accidents. Like today.
We decided to get an early start to Roanoke this morning and left home a few minutes after nine. We should have been in Roanoke a few minutes after ten. We didn't get there until eleven.
We made good time until just past Boones Mill. Then the traffic slowed to a crawl. We crawled for about two miles until we came to a policeman who diverted traffic onto Naff Road. He said there'd been an accident. That's all we knew.
As we joined the bumper-to-bumper traffic up the mountain, we heard on the radio that a tractor trailer carrying explosives had over-turned and blocked both sides of Route 220.
Since we weren't going anywhere fast, we might as well enjoy the ride. It was a pretty day for a drive through the mountains. lat night's rain had washed every thing clean.
About halfway through the drive, I remembered I had my camera. This is what I saw:
Finally Naff Road became Merriman Road, and we knew where we were: the Starkey section of Roanoke County—the other side of Roanoke from where we needed to be.
We later learned that the accident was cleared up by 10:15. If we'd left home fifteen minutes later, we could have arrived an hour earlier.
We decided to get an early start to Roanoke this morning and left home a few minutes after nine. We should have been in Roanoke a few minutes after ten. We didn't get there until eleven.
We made good time until just past Boones Mill. Then the traffic slowed to a crawl. We crawled for about two miles until we came to a policeman who diverted traffic onto Naff Road. He said there'd been an accident. That's all we knew.
As we joined the bumper-to-bumper traffic up the mountain, we heard on the radio that a tractor trailer carrying explosives had over-turned and blocked both sides of Route 220.
Since we weren't going anywhere fast, we might as well enjoy the ride. It was a pretty day for a drive through the mountains. lat night's rain had washed every thing clean.
About halfway through the drive, I remembered I had my camera. This is what I saw:
Finally Naff Road became Merriman Road, and we knew where we were: the Starkey section of Roanoke County—the other side of Roanoke from where we needed to be.
We later learned that the accident was cleared up by 10:15. If we'd left home fifteen minutes later, we could have arrived an hour earlier.
~
Labels: rural life
posted by Becky Mushko | 9:51 PM
2 Comments:
I heard about that on the radio. It sounded like a lot of other wrecks going on at the same time because of the detour.
It was a mess, wasn't it? Naff Road is a wonderful side route, I wrote a poem about it several years ago. Shannon gave me the heads up and we detoured through Windy Gap (Rt. 122 to 116) because we heard Naff was bumper to bumper. It still took me two hours to get to the RAC. It was bumper to bumper there too.
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