Road Trippin'

This is Day 1 of The Trip.

I went a lot further than I thought I would. Which made it a long day. A Real Long Day. But almost 900 miles out of the way. Which means that I can take it easy and maybe do a little sightseeing along the way since I am not due into Corona until Wednesday evening. I only have 1600 more miles to go and three full days to do it. Since I haven't seen the Grand Canyon yet, I figure I might take a jaunt off to get a look at it.

Meanwhile, let's talk about traffic. I was reminded that I have an Idiot Magnet installed in my car. I first realized it when BMW X5 crawled up onto my rear bumper...then backed away... repeatedly. Then she (yes, it was a woman driver) moved into another lane and pulled alongside and then paced my car. And then backed away. And then another car did the same thing. And the BMW came back again, even though it had passed me a couple of lanes over some time before.

I was beginning to think there was blood seeping out from the corpse in the trunk. Seriously, I began to realize there were Idiot Magnets installed inside of every vehicle on the road, foreign and domestic. What else explains the clustering we see? You know what clustering is, don't you? That's where groups of cars assemble into small herds as they travel the highways. The Idiot Magnets attract each other, preventing the vehicles from speeding up or slowing down once they have reached the cluster.

I am trying to figure out just who it is that wants smaller, more efficient vehicles. A good 75% of the vehicles on the road were SUVs and pickups. Big pickups. And generally big SUVs. All driven by people with phones attached to their ears in some way. Either directly or through one of those Bluetooth ear thingies. What is all the conversation about anyway? We rarely spent this much time of the phone when they were wired into the walls. Unless we were teenagers and, even then, mostly female teenagers.

Only one traffic slowdown in all that time. A semi's trailer seemed to have caught fire. How the heck does that happen? Anyway, it was on the other side of the road, the eastbound side. Traffic on that side was backed up at least 5 miles. Cars and trucks trying to cross the median to go back the other way were getting stuck unless they were 4x4s. What a mess!

The final part of this day's trip included a ride across a swamp in Louisiana. The ride was 15-18 miles long. It was all bridge, mostly 15 feet above the water. There were trees growing in the water. How does that happen? How do they take root? The swamp had to be drained to bare ground during a drought, I suppose. Lots of trees. Cypress mostly. Odd. Sorry, no pics of that.

Back on the road tomorrow. Through Texas and into New Mexico and maybe Arizona.