Smile-breaks
Must Be Summer – There’s Chaos on the Freeways
It must be summer. You can tell the minute you hit the freeway ’cause it’s chaos out there! Those slow steady streams of traffic with everyone driving in their usual lane, merging to the right as they exit the freeway and slowing for the same old bottlenecks have gone berserk. No more normal September to May ebb and flow. Traffic on the freeway has gone nuts. Yep - summer’s here.
Strangers are wreaking havoc on our normally predictable freeways – tourists trying to find their way back to their hotels, kids out of school driving around looking for fun, grandmas freshly arrived from the Midwest maneuvering rental cars as best they can, sun-bleached sun-screened teenagers riding with colorful surfboards snugly fastened to their rooftops, sporty seniors breezing down the lanes in carefree convertibles, working moms taking their kids to summer camps at unfamiliar destinations. They’re all weaving their way through the once-steady stream of daily commuters who just want to get to work on time. And alive would be nice, too.
From September to May, freeway driving’s trouble-free, except for the usual fifty-mile-an-hour-ers in the fast lane and the zigzag specialist zinging across five lanes to get to the off-ramp and the pushy tailgaters and all those annoying traffic jams. But we’re used to those. We expect them and know exactly what to say as they block our forward progress, breathe down our taillights and zip past our left front fender within inches of our life. That we can handle.
Come summer, it’s best to put the cell phone down and leave the morning coffee at home. Come summer, if you value your life, you’ll drop everything and focus on the road - ’cause there’s madness out there.
And if you’re the one who’s out-of-town driving on someone else’s freeway – that's even worse. Or better - if you like living dangerously. At home on your own familiar freeways, you’ve at least got a chance. Advantage you – you know your exits and where the bottlenecks are and your local driver-types. Off in another state on an unfamiliar freeway that’s called a turnpike or parkway or something silly like that, you’re lucky to see the exit sign as you whiz by the off-ramp.
See those orange cones? They’re not telling you to merge from the left lane to the right lane. That’s only in California. Anywhere else, they’re telling you to get off at the next exit and follow the orange brick road until...
Detour. Fourteen mile detour for summer road work. Of course the exit you’re supposed to take is two miles down the freeway, somewhere between where you now have to exit and where you’ll return to the freeway a half hour from now. Good luck!
Plus you’re probably driving a Chevy rental car and your car at home is a Nissan and just when you figure out how to turn on the air conditioning, dark clouds rise up in the east and suddenly you’re praying that those dark clouds don’t mean rain ’cause you have no idea where the windshield wiper turner-onner is and rainstorms here come with blasts of thunder and bolts of lightning and huge raindrops splatting off the hood so you can’t see past the windshield even if you did figure out how to turn the wipers on - but you didn’t.
Adventure. That’s what they call it. Summer adventure on the freeways. You don’t have to climb Mount Everest, dive off that twenty foot cliff or go scuba-diving in the coral reefs… You’ve got it all right here on the freeway – see ya out there!