Sunday Stills: How Do You Commute?

Thanks to Terri and her Second Winds Leisure blog for continuing to run the Sunday Stills challenge. Here’s what she says about this weeks challenge

Transportation is the theme for this week’s Sunday Stills challenge. “Commute” can also work, pun intended, which means to travel some distance regularly between one’s home and one’s place of work, school or vocation. Or, by definition, to travel as a commuter.

OK. So here goes.

My ‘normal’ job, my profession, is: merchant mariner. I am a US Coast Guard licensed Master Mariner and also a certified Dynamic Positioning Operator (DPO). So I spend most of my time working on ships. Since the last downturn in the price of oil (2014) has decimated the amount of work out there, I’ve had to try my hand at anything else I could find. I’ve been working as a role-player during maritime emergency training, teaching maritime courses, writing, and painting. Since then, my commute has been ordinary- just driving. It’s much more interesting when I’m sailing.

 

 

 

Since I live in a smallish town on the coast of Texas, my commute almost always involves first driving to an airport (or port) in Houston. Almost all of the offshore work in the Gulf of Mexico is concentrated out of Port Fourchon, LA now a days. So, I fly into New Orleans, meet up with other crew members for a ride down to Fourchon. From there we will either ride a crew boat or helicopter out to the vessel we’ll be working on for the next 3-4 weeks.

If I’m sailing “deep sea”, I’ll drive up to the dock where I’ll meet my ship (usually) in Houston. I’ll stay onboard for 2-3 months. They’ll fly me back to the airport in Houston. I’ll take a cab back to wherever I left my car when I joined the ship.

USNS Mendonca in Corpus Christi

If you want to join the challenge and see what everyone else has done, click here.

Two and a Half

HOURS!

Thats how long it took me to get home from work today!

There was an accident and they had highway 288 shut down. It wasn’t even rush hour yet, but the traffic was bumper to bumper, stop and go from highway 59 all the way down to Beltway 8! They blocked the highway at Reed Road.

They did have warning signs up on 610, but didn’t really hint at how bad the traffic would be. Wow! I’m so sorry I didn’t flip around to 45 and Almeda-Genoa. I could have cut an hour off my drive.

I did try to avoid the mess and drove around a bunch of back roads, but plenty of others had the same idea. Traffic was ridiculous on the surface streets too.

One of the biggest benefits of working offshore is NOT having to deal with traffic! I’ll never understand how people manage to deal with that every day for years on end and not go completely nuts.