OH, I WAS so informed. So smart. So smug. And yet I still found myself stuck in the Grand Beer Tank Block-up early Sunday morning with a bunch of other motorists who ranged from curious to furious.

It shouldn't have happened that way.

Like other readers of this paper, I'd read all the stories that detailed the way giant beer fermenting tanks are being ferried on Saturday nights from a farm where they've been stored in King George County to their eventual home at a Coors brewing plant in the Shenandoah Valley.

On top of that, both my children got stuck in the traffic snarl the week before when they tried to maneuver around Fredericksburg on different evenings.

So three or four different ways, I should have been warned.

But like so many times in my life, it was the love of a doughnut that led me down the primrose, um, make that the trooper-blocked path.

Out Saturday night reviewing a movie, it was around midnight when I trailed out of the theater in Massaponax and contemplated the trip home.

Normally, it would have been a simple thing to hop on I-95 and get into my subdivision in the city off State Route 3.

Oh, but that's where the doughnut comes in. I figured that by heading back into town on U.S. 1, I could probably stop at a convenience store along the way and snag one for a post-midnight snack.

That didn't really work when most of the stores on the way home were closed, so I just figured on heading home the long way.

That is, until I saw two state police cruisers parked sideways across U.S. 1, with flares blazing.

For a minute, Mr. Up to the Minute Newsman wondered what in the world it was he was seeing.

Until, duh, it hit me, this was the Grand Beer Tank Block-up I should have known would be in place.

Ah, but knowing the ins and outs of all streets in Fredericksburg, I immediately became determined to beat this oh-so-inconvenient roadblock.