City Driver

Went to visit my brother waaaaaaay upstate this weekend with the monsters and my parents. Since the husband had worked the night before, I drove (both ways) while he snoozed in the back.

We have plenty of family that live upstate, in South Jersey, and in Pennsylvania so we do a fair amount of travelling by car. Despite the fact that I've been the driver of many of these trips for many years now, one thing remains...I HATE DRIVING OUTSIDE OF THE CITY.

No lights at night, no shoulders and two lane (one in each direction) roads make me frickin insane. Strange that I dislike two lane country highways because I always used to choose the center tube of the Lincoln Tunnel which at night would go in both directions, but I digress.

I hate driving in the country.

As I drove home the other evening, in the rain, might I add, with lots of pissed off people behind me because 60 mph wasn't fast enough for them, I was thinking that perhaps I should fashion a bumper sticker or sign for the hood of my truck that says "City Driver" or something to that effect. I thought that perhaps if I had that notation on my vehicle, the people following me would then go, "OK, well that explains it" and pass me instead of trying to blind me by flashing their hi-beams and thereby complicating things further.

I did, after all, have almost my entire family in the car with me and my Speed Racer days are well behind me. To further add to my white knuckle, clenched teeth driving experience, my precious baby spent a good deal of the car ride (both ways) saying, "Bye bye car!" Now, while that would have gotten her thrown off a plane, I couldn't kick her out of the car. I can't say that the idea of strapping various members of my family to the roof of my car hasn't crossed my mind every now and again, but those nasty state troopers in their lace-up boots and kicky hats wouldn't approve of that either.

Not until we hit the well-lit roads of Yonkers do I allow myself to ease back into my seat and pluck my nails from the steering wheel. We survived another trip with Dan at the wheel and I'm sure the whole fam was surprised that no one was screamed at, the whole trip, for incorrectly reading me directions from a printed sheet. That's something else I'm notorious for.

Quite the rambling post, I know.