Avoiding the Highway

I remember how tentative I was when I first started driving. This stuck with me pretty much until we moved to California. I found that driving around San Francisco forced me to learn how to handle traffic and now I am pretty much nonplussed when I am in traffic. Now that I live near Raleigh I hear how locals bemoan the heavy traffic we have and I just chuckle a little bit. Yes, it gets heavy in the afternoons near RTP, but it's nothing like the snarl that is the highway system around a city like San Francisco.

However, I had some experiences on Wednesday and Thursday that are starting to make me a little more tentative about the highway. I was exhausted Wednesday morning and just driving along in a near trance. I was thinking about how glad I was that my morning commute is so easy and uneventful. A few minutes later I noticed a truck starting to get closer to me and it seemed like it was going to come into my lane. I don't mind getting cut off so much, but I don't like it when someone tries to share space with me. I hit the brakes and actually used the horn. I almost never use the horn, but it seemed appropriate this time. That gave me a little jolt of adrenaline that helped me stay awake :)

That afternoon I was on the highway for only a few minutes when I noticed a disc of some sort coming at me. It was the top of some kind of Rubbermaid container and it hit the windshield right in front of my face. I closed my eyes as it hit. I'm not sure why I didn't turn away or duck as I still would have been cut up if it broke the windshield, but fortunately nothing happened.

Then yesterday morning I as I drove to work I noticed traffic in front of me slowing down. I also noticed a cloud of small red and blue things on the road. Turns out that a truck carrying garbage bags full of aluminum cans lost one of the bags out the back. I had to slow down to go through them, but I don't think that my car was damaged at all.

I guess I should just be thankful that none of these events was more serious. It was just strange to have so many things happen to me on what is otherwise a normally uneventful commute. Then again, the day that someone crosses the yellow line and hits someone head-on is no different, is it? These things happen and it is only by God's grace that I get to keep drawing breath.