Stereotypes on the Road

Thursday night at the new members’ class for the church I’ve been attending here in Northern Virginia, the volunteer leader made an observation on her holiday driving habits that I found rather insightful. Visiting family in Wisconsin, she said it took her three days to adjust to the rhythm of Midwestern country roads: not honking when it took the driver in front of her more than a second to react to a red light, expecting farmers to be out on a slow-speed cruise around the county, etc. That echoed my feeling of displacement driving from the Indianapolis Airport to Columbus, IN last Friday night, as I realized my recently-developed NoVA driving style stuck out like a sore thumb on I-465.

So Friday morning on my commute (40 minutes, only one major tie-up at the Dulles Connector/66 east merge), I thought about how I’d characterize the driving environment in several of the places I’ve visited recently, and decided it might be interesting to poll my readers as well, whether on these places or others they know.

So, to start off:

• Northern Virginia — the best way I’ve found to describe it is moderate aggression combined with a hair-trigger temper. Bad combination. In an ordinary situation, you can expect the average 703-lander to be rather impatient about stoplights, quick to change lanes without much advance signaling, and not too worried about proper following distance. All of that is somewhat anti-social, but tolerable. But the temper problem means that whenever traffic is bad (on the major highways, that’s from 6 AM-9 PM weekdays), people jump straight from zero to psycho in no time flat.
• Massachussetts — the term “Masshole” was invented specifically for drivers here. ‘Nuff said.
• South Florida — some of Dave Barry’s best columns, in my view, were about his hometown of Miami and what he described as the “craziness” of South Floridians. That description fits their drivers like a glove. You run the gamut there, from retirees who view 30 mph as an absolute upper limit, no matter the road, to Benzes, Lexuses and import motorcycles that draw no reaction as they fly down I-95 at speeds in the low triple digits. Anything can happen and usually does, so just be aware.
• Atlanta, on the other hand, is more predictable: where South Florida drivers are crazy, Atlanta drivers are just stupid. If you’re wondering what a driver is going to do, just figure the dumbest possible thing and get ready. They run the I-285 Perimeter like it’s the Atlanta Motor Speedway; they make right turns from left lanes across 3 through lanes of traffic and think nothing of it; blind curve passing/lane changing foolishness is just par for the course. And don’t even get me started on the 75-85 northbound split, where traffic engineers contributed to the problem. Looking at a map, you’ll see that 75 goes northwest and 85 goes northeast from the split point; the obvious solution would be for lanes for 75 North to split left and lanes for 85 North to split right, correct? WRONG — if you work for GaDOT, that is. Far better to reverse them and have the exiting lanes immediately cross over one another.
• Pennsylvania — these folks are actually remarkably calm, given the roads they have to drive on.

What do you think?

New Orleans Notes

Before we move into a long, cold winter without football or hockey, a few final notes on the Sugar Bowl and the city.

• My distaste with their team’s final drive aside, the Auburn fans I met on our flights down and in New Orleans were uniformly quality people — knowledgeable, dedicated and fired-up. And, like I’ve said, until the 1:57 mark I had no problem at all with their team’s play.
• That said, it’s curious how that sequence changed Hokie fans’ postgame mood for the better. Until then, I think we would have left the Dome in low spirits, quietly acknowledging Auburn’s superiority and wishing we could have just hit a few more passes earlier in the game. Instead, our heads were held high, and we were chanting “LET’S GO HOKIES!” down the square-spiral ramps, out onto the entrance plaza and on the way to the French Quarter.
• And yes, I’m with Coach Beamer: if in the preseason, you’d have offered me a 10-3 year, with a loss to an undefeated SEC team in a BCS bowl, I’d have taken it in a second. It was a magical year — maybe more so than 1999 because of how it happened.
• It’s easy to say this after last night’s beatdown, but I was saying it yesterday morning too: USC is a better team than Auburn, based on both the season as a whole and my observations from the games we played against both teams. USC played us tougher and faced a legitimate non-conference schedule pre-bowl, as opposed to the Tigers.
• Speaking of said Tigers’ out-of-conference schedules, they’re so terrible because Auburn decided recently it had to have seven home games every year and no OOC road games. No self-respecting I-A program will offer a visit or two without at least one return, not even most MAC schools, so they wind up with WAC, Sun Belt and I-AAers on the schedule. One effect of that decision was the cancellation of a 2010-11 home-and-home contract (see 8/11/03 comment) with… Virginia Tech. How much do we Hokies wish those games were still on now? Quite a lot.

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Seattle/Vancouver Scorecard

Actual content (like a football preview) coming very soon. Meanwhile…

• United standby rules 1, originally-scheduled 12:18 AM PDT (3:18 AM EDT) arrivals SEA 0
• Evergreen-flanked highways 405, concrete jungles 5
• Canadian Olympic coverage 99, US coverage 5
• Canadian Olympic medals 7, US medals 76 (at last count)
• Canadian border at White Rock, BC 60, US border at Blaine, WA 10 (low score wins here)
• Pacific Northwest/Lower Mainland rain 2, Vancouver touring plans 1
• Modern technology 1, freshman BT bus schedule confusion 0 (press one button and say my name in Blacksburg, and within seconds I’m talking to you from a fish-and-chips shop in west Vancouver, British Columbia)
• Josh’s Canadian coin collection 7, circulation 1 (still couldn’t find the St. Croix quarter…)
• Garmin iQue several million, geographic confusion 0
• Seattle high 68°, Richmond high 85° (again, low score wins)
• Josh’s Denver-mint state quarter collection 2, circulation 20 (yeah, that didn’t work so well)
• New states on the return trip 1, delays :45
• Said state’s sales tax at SFO about 9%, Josh’s wallet 0
• Hotwiring a Dulles hotel $83, 1:20 AM IAD-Richmond drives 0

Boston, a Bridge-Tunnel, Ballin', and a Bonus

This is the problem with waiting a month to post about two trips — by the time you’re actually writing, you feel like you should have something profound to say, and I really don’t. Ah well.

As for Boston:

• As I did in Paris last spring, we stayed with a friend of mine living in the suburbs (in this case, Brookline) and caught rail service into town. It’s a neat way to see a different part of the city than you’d get sticking to the usual tourist track… including oddities such as a kosher Chinese restaurant (no joke).
• Boston is one part of the country that has resisted the normalizing effect of national media on its distinctive local accent — which made it disappointing to jump on a Green Line train and find that the station announcements had been recorded and automated by someone with a neutral mid-American accent. No more “Ahhh-lington” and “Paaahhk” stops anymore — they found someone who has Rs and isn’t afraid to use them.
• One thing the city does really well is to blend franchised or chain businesses into the local architecture. You’ll find a Starbucks every three blocks and a Dunkin Donuts every two, but odds are you’ll have to look inside the window to catch the brand name, because the facade looks the same as that of the law firm on one side and the condo on the other.
• But one thing they don’t do well is the massive public works/civil engineering project. The Big Dig, a project to replace I-93’s above-ground section through downtown Boston with a tunnel, has been going on for nearly twenty years, with grotesque cost overruns, major contractor screwups, political chicanery by the environmental lobby, and just about every brand of fun you could think of. They claim it’s almost over, with merely surface street reconstruction to be completed by mid-2005, but don’t bet on it.

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Toronto, One Month Later

On the first night of the Stanley Cup Finals, it seems appropriate to finally wrap up the trip that included my encounter with hockey’s Holy Grail itself. So, on with the trip-reporting excitement.

The Drive Up

Leaving from Christiansburg following a post-Wesley Weekend lunch, I didn’t hit the road until 3 PM for my scenic 10.5 hour drive through almost the entire North-South length of West Virginia (save the Northern Panhandle), along the western border of Pennsylvania, then from Erie to Toronto via the rough S-curve of I-90, I-190, the Peace Bridge, and the QEW around Lakes Erie and Ontario. Fun times:

• Goal 1: make sure my brand-new E-ZPass worked: SUCCESS. It doesn’t do anything for me in Virginia yet (Smart Tag facilities will be integrated by the fall), but it saved me at least 10 minutes northbound and 15 minutes southbound on this trip.
• Goal 2: avoid stopping in West Virginia: SUCCESS. After last year’s ACC mess, I wasn’t eager to leave my Hokie-plated TDI unattended in WV, especially as I-79 took me through Morgantown. I managed to clear the state by 7 PM, and stopped for dinner outside Pittsburgh.
• Goal 3: survive PA roads without major trouble: NEUTRAL. It was foolish of me to hope for smooth sailing through that miserable state, but even though 79 narrowed to one lane in each direction for about ten miles around Grove City (halfway up), I managed to hold the 45 mph speed limit through that section.
• Goal 4: make the border by midnight: SUCCESS. Even better, the Canadian border agent gave me no trouble at all. It was a bit worrisome that he didn’t ask for a bit of ID: no passport, no car registration or insurance paperwork, NOTHING, but I wasn’t going to complain (besides, all that stuff was sitting on my passenger seat in plain view).

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