Traffic going to and from work has been pretty bad this week. I expect it’ll be much better the next two weeks as everyone does the usual year-end “use it or lose it” vacation, but that’s next week. Today, I was sitting in four lanes of pretty much bumper-to-bumper traffic. That’s when I heard the sirens.
Sitting in traffic like that, sirens are rarely a good thing. I figured this must mean it was a fairly recent accident, and I was going to be sitting there for a while until they got things sorted out enough to direct traffic around it.
I glanced over at the passenger-side rear-view mirror and saw a group of police motorcycles and squad cars driving down the shoulder of the road. They don’t typically put motorcycles out on the highway during rush hour, and you hardly ever see them at all this time of year.
I then realized, this wasn’t an accident response, this was a motorcade! Motorcades are a dime-a-dozen in this area, but they’re far more common downtown or going between downtown and one of the airports. You never see them in my part of “Sprawlsville.” And who would put a motorcade on a major highway during rush hour?
So I watched the first officer zip by on his motorcycle, followed by another and another. The guy riding on the last motorcycle in the group stood out from the rest. It was a police motorcycle like the others, but this guy was huge and unlike the officers on the other motorcycles, he had a beard flapping in the wind and was dressed in a bright red outfit with white trim….
I had a huge grin on my face once I realized what was going on. The motorcade was for Santa!!
As I watched the motorcade continue down the highway, a bit of Christmas magic happened and traffic got a whole lot better.
It was a terrific start to the day.