Well, 11 hour drive number 2 is complete. I'm back in Charleston. I finished up my page and a half of 'to-do' list items for my mom, left the house in working order and my mom is starting to be able to smile again and talk on the phone, so I'm feeling good. They backed her off the IV antibiotics and are continuing to lower the steroid dosages, so hopefully she can go home early next week.
Between the drive up and back, and then at least one drive to Hopkins each day if not two, I have put another 1,000 or so miles on my car and have decided that I have a few general comments regarding driving for the blogspace...
1) I feel like it's not too much to ask there to be a law that tractor trailers are not allowed in the left hand lane of a 3 lane highway. I get that on a 2 way highway they need to be able to pass cars, but when there are 3 lanes, I just find it very difficult to swallow that the 8 tractor trailers spanning all three lanes and slowing all of us down to 40 miles an hour is necessary. Sorry that your tractor trailer buddies are 8/10th of a mile an hour slower than you, deal with life. You are 20 miles an hour slower than me and the other 50 cars you are slowing down in these 3 lanes!
2) Along those lines, but not really. How in the world can there be 5 lanes of traffic at 9:30 at night? It's truly amazing, but true. I left last night to drive half way back down, after much prodding from my mom to do so. I figured if I left when my dad went down for dinner visit to my mom, I'd be rolling through DC at a safe 8-9pm. And then I hit Alexandria, where I sat in 45 minutes of traffic to go 4 miles at 9:30 at night. No accident, no construction, just plain old, too many cars on the road. I apologize for any of you who live in that God-forsaken place. Let's just say, you would need to drug me and pay me about 18 times what I make now to move to Northern VA.
3) I do believe I've determined why road rage is so prevalent. Let me use an example from the land of fisheries management. If you study why overfishing is such a major issue, it pretty much comes down to the fact that our fishing methods have become too efficient for the fish populations. When we couldn't catch as many at one time, they could reproduce to keep their numbers up. But now, we can catch so many and so fast that they literally have no chance against us. Why am I comparing this to road rage. Well, on a given day if you walk to all the places you need to go you would pass a decent number of people, but not all that many, and while you may pass a person or two that was doing something somewhat annoying, it probably wouldn't be all that much of an issue because by the next block you would be out of their way. However when you are driving, you can cover so much more space in the same time that you just have a higher efficiency in meeting idiots I think. And so you inevitably pass the people who are driving like they are somehow totally confused by the general rules of courtesy and plain sanity. So, the car has made so we literally have no chance but to come across people that make us want to ram our car into the back of theirs, if only we didn't have to pay their damages :)
And with that, I'm going to go to bed. Well, read and then go to bed. I'm excited that it's in my own bed tonight, although I did miss seeing my mom and dad today. And the mint chocolate chip ice cream in the freezer was no substitute for a peppermint patty snowball...just saying.
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