And sit.
And sit.
"We've gone 25 miles, and we left 40 minutes ago," he notes.
Charles McClister takes a train about once a week but has problems with public transit's schedules and reliability.
(Ricky Carioti -- The Washington Post)
|
|
|
Traffic picks up, and he passes the exit near where he used to live. "It's so expensive to live there," he says, looking down the offramp. When they lived in Gaithersburg, "we were home at 6 o'clock and we were having dinner."
Nowadays, McClister packs his breakfast, lunch and dinner.
His wife works, too, and that is another reason Frederick makes sense for them. She consults at several hospitals, many near Frederick, so any move closer to his job is a move farther from hers.
Up ahead, there has been a fender bender that has left a van sitting in the middle of the road. McClister doesn't know this. He only knows that he's barely budging.
"We've gone one mile in about four minutes," he says.
A little later: "We've gone about a half-mile in five minutes."
It's now 7 a.m. McClister has gotten from his home to the Capital Beltway in an hour.
McClister starts to get lucky. The road is surprisingly clear to the exit for Connecticut Avenue, he lucks into a series of green lights through the city and is able to pull his car into the UDC garage at 7:19.
He catches a break on Metro, too. A packed train like the ones he's usually forced onto pulls out of the station as he reaches the platform and he gets a seat on a nearly empty one that comes directly behind.
McClister gets to work about 7:45. "Today was a good day. By the time I get through security and everything else, it'll be 8."
Exactly two hours after he left home.
