Kinja reply

This is the story of a bachelor party gone wrong.

Well, not so much the party, but the driving home. Our group of ~12 went to Key West for my friends’ Bachelor and Bachelorette parties for a weekend in May 2016. We rented a 15 passenger van, loaded it up with alcohol picked people up in Orlando and West Palm along the way and made the drive ~7-8 hours down to Key West. Partied all weekend and then it was time to go home.

Half the group with less serious jobs decided they wanted to stay another night and rent a 2nd car to go home on Monday instead. (Having a big boy job and client meetings the next day I was not able to do this.) We rented a Ford Flex and 6 of us began our drive back to the Orlando and Tampa areas.

A little over 2 hours into the drive (the distance from Key West to the bridge to the mainland) we hit dead stop traffic. There are two ways off of the keys and back to the mainland, we took US1, the most common.

2 hours later, we had not moved, it was at that moment that reality started sinking in.

Keep in mind we were right here:

This is what the road looks like:

A little while later, EVERYONE was out of their cars and finally some police go by us in the grass. After another hour we decide to walk. About 1-2 miles down the road from us we see the problem. A truck and RV trailer have managed to flip and are blocking not only the 1 lane road, but the emergency lane AND the grass all the way up to the fence. We’re F****d.

We talk to some people who are up near the front and they say that a crane is on the way to move the wreckage.. from Miami. Queue at-least another 1 hour wait.

Turns out it was 12 hours, TWELVE HOURS stuck on US-1 without moving. I ended up getting home the next day, missed work, no call no-show because my phone was dead and I passed out after being awake for well over 24 hours. The rental’s plugs weren’t working to charge phones either. It took 19-20 hours in total to get back home.

Meanwhile, half the wedding party crew had a relaxing night on Marathon because they wanted to stay and keep the party going. Morale of the story, if you have the opportunity to stay on vacation an extra day with friends, take it.