Yes, I have returned...but I am in a bad mood because I spent nearly nine hours on the road yesterday, and I haven't gotten over it. My love affair with 101 has decidedly come to an end, I fear, and it was always a tenuous love at best. The drive along the coast is certainly more beautiful and less hypnosis-inducing than the route up the middle of the state through bogglingly-boring stretches of flat farmland and along a road that is almost completely straight for six hours, but there are not as many convenient stops as on I-5, and it takes even longer.
But I've always thought that perhaps the scenery was worth it until yesterday when I hit...TRAFFIC! On a Sunday! I HATE traffic (oh the irony of living in California, and LA in particular), and the worst swear words in the world are not sufficient to do justice to my absolute abhorrence of sitting in a car on a freeway going 0-5 miles an hour and having to shift, then downshift, brake, shift, downshift, brake then watch someone with their signal on who has either forgotten to turn it off (grrrr) or is not agressive enough to do what needs to be done and just CUT INTO THE LANE. Then shift, downshift, brake, shift, downshift, brake, ignore the catcalls and stares and horn-honking of guys in trucks that you get stuck next to, because you are going 0-5 and so are they, then slam on the brakes because you were paying more attention to ignoring the guys in the truck than to the car in front of you and nearly ended up in someone else's back seat. And so on, repeating, indefinitely.
BLEAH. And then there's the feeling when you get to a place where you can see the freeway ahead of you for a few miles and you hope, hope, hope with a not-so-quiet desperation (in my case) that you are almost out of the woods, but no...all you can see ahead of you is the forest of red taillights.
Near Santa Barbara, in an entire hour I went all of 12 miles. Aaaarrrggghhh!
Well, I am not a patient person at the best of times, and I've noticed with some alarm and disappointment that I am becoming less patient as I get older. I sort of hoped that the reverse would be true, and I'd be wearing a saintly halo shining with the brightness of my angelic forbearance by the time I hit 30 or so, but alas!
Anyway, let's just say that it's a good thing I do most of my driving alone, because if road rage had a poster girl, I would be it. I mean her.
4 comments:
Traffic in a stick shift is one of the most frustrating things in the world! Last time I went to LA there was a fire at the top of the grapevine, so we were at a CRAWL... I remember celebrating getting into third! Although luckily I had a carload of people to keep me relatively sane.
Bummer about the traffic, but it was worth it to visit us bay area folks, right?
Hey, did you end up going camping?
"ignore the catcalls and stares and horn-honking of guys in trucks that you get stuck next to,"
gracky's still got it... even at 30 ;-)
oh yeah, phil. you'd better believe it! :)
no camping, becca. should have, but didn't. oh well. and of course it was worth it to visit! too bad it couldn't have been longer. maybe next time...
On the bright side, having to stay focused when there's a lot of traffic on the road has made me a much better driver. When I'm in the Midwest, I'm awed at how crazy people get when they're in traffic!
But thanks for braving the traffic to visit the Bay Area!
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