On Friday afternoon, Lyssa and I spent a goodly part of the day laying around Jean's apartment to recover while she was at work. Long road trips wear me out, especially when I'm driving, so I wasn't in any mood to complain overmuch because we weren't doing anything. In fact, we were doing a large amount of blessedly nothing at all. When Jean got home we set forth once more to find dinner and visit Modern Myths, the gaming and comic book store run by old friends of Jean and Lyssa. We wound up at a mall not too distant …

Yesterday afternoon Lyssa and I struck out northward for New England to visit Jean, an old friend just over the Connecticut border. We loaded up the newly repaired TARDIS and headed for the Beltway around 1500 EST5EDT yesterday afternoon.

Now, seeing as how it was the day before Memorial Day weekend began, we should have realised how bad the traffic on the Beltway was going to be, but we'd figured that if we left early we'd beat the rush and not experience any undue delays.

This was not the case. The Beltway was a parking lot of people leaving work …