A Minnesotan

Construction Season

Posted

First off, a special thanks to Bill and Marla Adams from Dodge Center, who sent me some lovely stories about geese in response to my last column. It is always nice to hear about braver souls than I, who were able to stand up to the gaggle of geese that reside in Silver Lake Park in Rochester—a place I ran from many times as a child.

Secondly, it has come around to that time of year again, now that we've soldiered through winter, first winter, second winter, and wondered why it is still winter. When the weather gets warmer and the days get longer, that's right—it is once again construction season in Minnesota.

As we all know, construction season means they start doing the serious road work again, not just patching up the potholes created by nearly six months of winter. Even though up in the Twin Cities where I currently reside, the filling of some of said potholes probably could count as major road work.

Quite recently, I was driving through the construction they are doing on Highway 52 between the cities and Rochester. If you have recently driven that route, you know it means going through two different construction sites that merge down to two lanes. However, these two lanes are placed extremely differently than they were last year or the year before when they worked on a different part of the highway.

Which brings me to the question: Am I the only one who feels like the Highway 52 project has been going on for over a decade now? I know that there were two different projects, with about a six-year gap between the current 52 project and the one that finished in 2015 (not to be confused with the one they did in the mid-2000s), bringing us to a grand total of three Highway 52 projects in this century.

While the many Highway 52 projects, like many highway projects in existence, seem like an ongoing never-ending story, they are not. At least we will always have something reliable to look forward to every construction season, as once this project is over, they will probably start another one in just a few years.