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The first thing I want to get off my chest is this -- Pittsburgh.
I'm sorry, but I will never complain about your roadways again. I can say this after a mini-vacation recently to the Washington, D.C., area that started out wonderfully, but ended up as the roadtrip from hell.
The beginning was terrific. My wife's cousin got married in Leesburg, Va., and we decided to make a vacation out of it with three of our four kids (lucky for Julianna, who missed a lot of the carnage).
We were to spend two days doing wedding stuff and three seeing the monuments, museums and the zoo in Washington. But as a good friend once said to me, "Life is what happens while you are making plans."
Life was only good for two days.
On the morning of the third day in Leesburg, my daughter, Maggie, got sick, and we had to take her to one of those medical express stations. She was sick, then the boys got sick that night, and by Monday morning, we were headed back to Hollidaysburg, skipping the last two days in D.C.
Staying at a hotel with three sick kids … there was nothing in the brochures from AAA to get us ready for that.
But before we all got to look like extras from AMC's "The Walking Dead," we did get to see the monuments, and I got to do something I never did before -- drive into the city and out of the city on I-495, the 64 miles of terror that goes in and out of our nation's capital.
How bad could it be, though, right, because it was Sunday? It was awful. Seven lanes of traffic, which is like six more than I even want to drive on.
My wife had our GPS on, and she had one on her phone, and guess what? They were giving us two different directions on how to get out of the city. And because she is so thorough, she was reading me directions from both systems. Pick one, please!
She was also kind enough to point out the sites like the Pentagon to my crew as I kept my death grip on the steering wheel. All I did was look straight ahead. If I want to see the Pentagon, I'll rent Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove."
A friend told me I should have read up on the roadways that surround the D.C. area, but I never wanted to be the driver to begin with. I had been to Washington twice before, and both times were on bus tours. I would much rather have someone who knows what they are doing put my life at risk than for me to put my life at risk.
What I should have done was watch the NASCAR race from the week before to get myself ready for such an event, but then I realized, NASCAR drivers are much safer doing what they do than the people of D.C. were doing on July 16.
We also found out that weekend that D.C. police were installing new cameras to catch people speeding on the beltway. They film you breaking the law, then mail you a ticket. Great. My family will have a home movie of their father laughing and dying at the same time as a keepsake.
And why was there so much traffic after 7 p.m. on a Sunday? I asked my wife to Google where the NASCAR race was being held that weekend, thinking maybe it was Dover, Del., and that we were hitting traffic from that.
Wrong: The NASCAR race was in New Hampshire that weekend. Drivers in D.C. are just nuts. Stay home, so that we can get home.
As of this writing, the count was that two of us ended up with bronchitis, two with sinus infections and my wife -- or as I like to call her "Chuck Norris," -- toyed with the idea of being sick, claiming to be no more than really tired with a bad headache.
If a virus is going to infect Ann Marie, it better have an itinerary because she does not have time for being sick. She was the only one who did not go to a doctor last week. Didn't have time.
So in a few weeks I will drive Julianna back to school in Pittsburgh. I will approach I-376 past Murrysville as we head for Carlow University, and I will laugh at any traffic that is thrown my way.
Of course, with my luck, we will go back on the same day that kids going to Pitt, Robert Morris, Duquesne, Chatham and Carnegie Mellon are going back.
And just maybe, life will laugh and toss in a Pirates game and a Steelers exhibition game to boot.
Mirror Sports Writer Scott Franco writes a monthly column for the Mirror.