Our house sits on a main street which connects several small villages to each other. There are other ways to get from A to B but going through our town is probably the easiest and fastest since we have very few traffic lights and they are rarely ever red.
A couple weeks ago we received a letter from the local government indicating that a portion of the road in front of our house would be closed down. Excellent, we thought. Maybe there will be a bit less traffic. And since the construction is slated to last until December, this would be a very welcome change.
Although the street outside is rather busy and a bit loud when construction trucks roll by to newly developing neighborhoods, it doesn’t really bother us. In fact, we are probably more disturbed when it’s totally silent than when there is lots of traffic.
But our hopes were much too high it seems. This is where the detour starts, about half a block down the street from us. There are actually two diversions through town which makes things a bit more simple for Stefan since the direction they encourage you to go in here would cause him to have a longer commute in the mornings.
It’s been about two weeks since the construction started and we don’t really notice any difference in the amount of traffic on the road. The first day there seemed to be slightly less but I think this may have just been people confused in general about where to go. Honestly I think we would be much worse off if the construction was right in front of our house because that would likely be noisier…although they would at least not work past 5pm or start before 9. And certainly not on the weekends either…but then driving in and out would probably be a larger pain.
One thing we are bummed out about is the fact that those people who live around the construction are now able to contact the city to have gas lines runs to their homes. Since we had so many months here with gas while cooking on our camping stove, we really did come to like it. They told us last year that it would be 3-4 years before it would be laid in our area…so maybe there is still road construction and a gas stove in our future.
We are still getting used to our new electric stove as it is and I have to say it’s really very nice. Most of the electric ranges we’ve had in the past have been very old or very low end. We’ve now got HOB 605 from IKEA and at least you can simmer a pot of beans on the stove top without needing to turn it off and on every 10 minutes to make sure it’s not over cooking everything…much more than we can say for our previous stoves.
