AUBURN, Ala. — The traffic gods have not been kind to me this week.

I’ve made no secret of my dislike for traffic. I don’t like creeping along in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I like to keep moving.

Early Wednesday morning — after a late election night and very little sleep — I left Gainesville for a quick trip to Blakely. A little before 8 a.m., I merged onto Interstate 85. A few minutes later, I was in a massive traffic jam.

I-85 is already five or six lanes wide. I’m not sure they’d solve the traffic problem if they doubled the number of lanes.

While I was inching along, my mother called to make sure I had left home safely. And, as she always does when I’m traveling, she ended our conversation with “Be careful.”

Of course, I’m going to be careful, I tell her. I’m only going 15 mph. How much damage can I do at this speed? Interstate highways are sometimes called expressways, which gives the allusion of, well, speed. That’s funny. Folks training for the Peachtree Road Race could pass me.

My mother laughed at my traffic predicament. That’s easy for her to do. She lives in a small town, miles away from the nearest interstate or traffic jam. There isn’t traffic in Blakely. There is no rush hour. There’s not even a rush minute. The only traffic jam I ever remember in Blakely was years ago when a log truck overturned on the square.

I’m very diligent about avoiding traffic. I live just three miles from my office, and there is really very little that slows me down on the way to work, except for a couple of traffic signals that must sense my presence because it’s not unusual for me to have to stop at one of them, even if there are no cars trying to cross in front of me.

I even work hard to avoid traffic when I go to Georgia football games. A lot of people tease me about getting to Athens at the crack of dawn. I do that mainly because I love having all day to tailgate with my friends. But I also do it because if I had to sit in game-day traffic every week, I’d get madder than I do when Mark Richt runs a draw play on third-and-22.

So back to Wednesday. There apparently is a law in Gwinnett County that requires everyone with a car to bring it to I-85 between 7 and 9 a.m. I sat in traffic for what seemed like hours, down I-85 through Spaghetti Junction all the way into downtown Atlanta.

In fact, it took me longer to drive from my house to downtown Atlanta than it did to drive from downtown Atlanta to Southwest Georgia. That’s just insane.

I was already dreading traffic this week, anyway. This weekend, I’m in Auburn, Ala. The Loveliest Village on the Plains, the locals call it. Traffic Hell, I call it.

Auburn is a small town of just over 50,000. On game weekends, though, about 100,000 fans descend on the town. That means the population of Auburn nearly triples on game days. Unfortunately, there are only a couple of roads out of Auburn, which makes post-game traffic jams here legendary.

Anyway, I took care of my business in Blakely and planned to spend the night with my mother. I had hoped to get up early Thursday so I could get back to Gainesville in time for work.

But, I thought, if I do that, I’ll hit the morning rush hour again in Atlanta. So I left late Wednesday afternoon, with the goal of getting through Atlanta and, then, Gwinnett County after 8 p.m.

It was a fine plan until I got just north of Spaghetti Junction and came to a complete halt. Again.

Apparently that Gwinnett County law applies at night, too.

Mitch Clarke is executive editor of The Times. His column appears Sundays. Read previous columns at gainesvilletimes.com/mitch.