the road less traveled

ever since i was a kid, according to my mom, i've been good with directions. so good, she related once, that i was actually able to direct her through the regular short-cut my school bus takes when i was a teeny-tiny pre-schooler.

i kid you not.

so, i don't know if it was just the built-in confidence level or my innate directional skills but i grew up with a good sense of direction. and that translated to me being adventurous with roads.

enter the c5 extension.



now, i'm a las pinera, and the c5 extension thing has been this giant white elephant, at least insofar as i was concerned, cause i never figured out (at least in my head) where it leads to. of course it says "c5 extension" and i knew where c5 was, but i couldn't exactly figure out how it connected to the c5. until one day, it made sense in my head and i thought, maybe somewhere through multi or villamor or something like that.

however, since a working day was never really a good day to try out new routes and i hardly ever leave the south on a weekend, i never had the chance to try out the c5 extension road.

until today.

so even if i hadn't had lunch yet (it was 430 p.m. already) and i had every plan of driving through the mcdonald's at kabihasnan, i figured, why not today?

so i tried it out.


at first it seemed promising: wide roads, directional signs, and most importantly, no traffic.

however, it wasn't long before i ended right smack in the middle of multi/merville. and there was zero directional signs. thank goodness for my (amazing!) skill in following other cars and my (amazing!) memory (translation: medyo naalala ko siya from the two or so times i passed there previously) because after a couple or so minutes of being *slightly* lost, i sort of found my way and was happily driving on familiar roads once more.

the verdict: it was a longer route, much longer than passing through kabihasnan-coastal-baclaran-edsa extension, and it was slightly hectic, especially if you're not familiar with the roads inside multinational and merville. also, it's about 2 to 3 kilometers only of paved highway before you hit the village and you're faced with a typical village road -- complete with humps, tricycles, and potholes. not exactly the fastest way to get from point a to b.

i love manny villar (even if i did not vote for him) and i love what his family has done for las pinas (at least the parts that i know). but i must say, i think the c5 extension was just a waste of the taxpayers' money.

*image uploaded by user "apiong" on http://www.skyscrapercity.com