Get the fuck outta the fast lane!!

To honor the recently departed George Carlin-

"Anyone who drives slower than you is an idiot and anyone who drives faster than you is a maniac!"

If you include bathroom breaks, fast food stops and gas fill ups I drove a combined 21 hours in the last 4 days on my trip to Greenville SC and back. 12 hours on Thursday and 9 hours on Sunday (Lynn drove for 2 hours) I've recently been in Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington DC and Delaware. (Trivia question- which of those states wasn't part of the 13 colonies?) I've seen gas pricing range from $4.33 a gallon to $3.67 a gallon. It was the sort of drive the sucks the life out of you. Admittedly, however, it doesn't come close to being as bad my 60 hours on a plane in 10 days that I once did on a trip to Asia. I really did try to make it go quicker but it's next to impossible to do some real speeding in the Atlantic corridor. The way down we took the PA turnpike to route 81 to route 77 to route 85. Almost the whole way was 2 lanes of traffic. We took route 85 all the way to 95 to get home. It was slightly faster but we had a decent amount of traffic to contend with for a Sunday.

My luck was the worst when it came to passing people. It seemed like trucks were driving side by side to make it impossible to pass. Plus they'd seemed to jump out in front of you at the last minute. Either that or you were constantly running into clusters. You'd have a good mile of driving by yourself on the highway at 85 mph and then you'd have about 10-20 cars all bunched up together for 5 miles. Unless you weaved in and out like Speed Racer or just pushed on the horn to get people out of your way you got stuck going slow. I guess some people feel safer when they have others in front of them or near them instead of driving out in the open. But the most annoying part is that people just will not get out of the passing lane when you move up behind them.

ARRRGHHH!! I really hate that! Get the fuck outta my way dammit!!

Whenever I see someone coming up behind me in my rear view mirror I move over to the right lane as soon as there is an opening. It's common courtesy and it's also the law in most states. Sure, my lead foot isn't exactly legal, but move over and you won't have to deal with me anymore.

At least the kids were about as best behaved as possible for a 12 hour drive. The DVD player helped, but even still I commend their demeanor as I have awful memories of me and my brother Duane constantly fighting in the car on vacations.

"Mom! Duane's touching me!!"

"Brian won't get his foot off my book!"

"Stop making faces at me!"

"Are we there yet?"

Duane and I used to fight over who sat in the seat behind my dad because the other side was considered the "hitting" side. He couldn't reach behind himself to whack whoever was misbehaving, so he would just hit whoever was sitting behind my mom whenever one of us would start complaining about the other. You definitely can see the strategic importance of sitting behind dad as you could be the aggressor without much punishment. Although, if you really did push your luck you'd get it good once you got out of the car and I do remember both of us getting a good beating one time when my dad pulled over to the side of the road because we were being so bad.

My kids hardly complained about how long it was taking at all and they got along fine. I must be a better father than my dad, especially since my kids don't argue on who gets to sit on the hitting side.