Sarah and I went up to Manchester yesterday to see the priest at my home church to start the process of getting married in the Catholic church. Process may be too strong a word, but it is more than just showing up. We both had to go in individually with Father Harrington and affirm that we were entering the marriage freely, etc. It was not, as we'd both sort of feared, a latter-day outpost of the Inquisition.

I'd not seen Father Harrington since my dad's funeral, and I'd forgotten how much I liked him. For all the grief the Catholic church has taken over the last year or so (from major media, the general public, and even crappy weblogs like this), it's clergymen like him that remind me why I still have, at some level, an interest in the faith at all. It didn't hurt that he has a very nice dog.

We also were talking and it turns out that at one time he was headmaster at a school and had (now) former BC head coach Steve Cedarchuk as his head hockey coach. Apparently, he did the same thing at this school that he did at BC- promise scholarships and spots on the team that he didn't have.

In any event, perhaps more notable than this step along the path to matrimony was our drive up to Manchester. We left the BU campus at, let's say 4:15. We got to the Route 1 North on-ramp at 5. It took us 45 minutes to travel about 3 miles.

Our appointment was at 6. At 5:45 we were still in Revere (just getting into Saugus). That's about 8 to 10 miles. Maybe. Traffic didn't really break until we got to the 128 North exit, and even then didn't really thin out until we got into Danvers.

All told, it took us 2 and a quarter hours to cover what is, normally, a leisurly 40 minute drive. And the Big Dig will do almost nothing to correct the traffic situation after the Tobin Bridge (and blessed little on Storrow Drive, though you can argue secondary effects by supposed smoother traffic on 93).

I can't see how people drive this every day. I'm convinced there is some level of insanity that descends upon people when it comes to cars. I know that not everyone lives or works in close proximity to a commuter rail or T stop. But I'd be hard-pressed, after months (or years) of commutes like yesterday, to see how driving was any better than making the effort to use public transportation. There's a huge garage in Lynn next to their commuter rail stop that's heavily underutilized, for example (then again, it is in Lynn).

The state could also help the situation by expanding the T and commuter rail networks. But why do that when you can spend $15 billion on a roadway system that's over-budget, behind schedule, and probably won't do a damn thing to improve congestion?