Some Driving Stuff

Some Driving Stuff

I just got back from getting the van inspected at the Lakewood inspection station. It was actually a relatively pleasant experience. The wait wasn’t long, there was a clean customer waiting room (although I waited outside of it) and the facility itself was clean and well-staffed (with pleasant people, no less!) About an hour and a half including driving there and back. Not bad!

I didn’t feel like writing about the driving stuff on Saturday, but as long as I’m on the subject. . .

We were at a lovely wedding, and the drive up had been pretty uneventful and traffic wasn’t too bad. Part of the festivities were in an outdoor tent, so many of us were outdoors to experience the excitement of an old guy hitting a parked car and the curb hard enough to set off his air bag and total the front end. The best man, a friend and former neighbor of ours commented that it was perfect, because it’s not a party until the cops arrive. Heh.

Driving back wasn’t bad either, but it always seems that the type of people heading south on the Parkway in the evening are a completely different sort from the ones heading north in the daytime. You can almost count on the idiot type, too. He’s in his late 20s to mid 30s, and he’s driving a late model BMW, Lexus, or Mercedes. It’s clean and pristine, and you wonder how he keeps it that way, because he’s an accident waiting for a place to happen. The first one that night was a black Lexus, and this fellow was in such a hurry that passing on the right and cutting between cars with only inches to spare wasn’t enough. . .with five lanes open, he was passing people on the right shoulder. Well, money can’t buy happiness, but it sure can buy Stupid. The “passing on the right with inches to spare even though there was room to pass on the left” move was practiced by a three Lexus drivers and two Mercedes drivers that night. A VW, a Mazda, and a Chevy truck with blue headlights AND fog lights AND four other unnecessary lights on the front were all doing the thing where they tailgate you frighteningly closely, then drop way back when you pull over to let them pass, only to speed up when you pull back into their lane to pass slower drivers. The VW also, a couple of times, waited until I (and a couple of other drivers) pulled out of his way, then pulled in front of us in our new lanes and THEN slowed down. Hubby keeps telling me it would be incredibly expensive to have the police out patrolling for this stuff all the time, but I for one would rather see them doing that than sitting on the median or the shoulder watching numbers on a radar gun. Of course, it would also be nice if people drove as if they were not the only important ones on the road, but that’s too much to ask for.