Yesterday I made the 80 minute trek to University of Wisconsin – Stout to pickup my brother Paul. When I left home to head over I was going to listen to my iPod. But, it died–I forgot to charge it. Great. So, instead I listened to the local classic rock station KQRS. They were doing this thing where they are playing their entire catalog of music alphabetically. All I heard both ways, for five hours, was the letter L. But, there are some pretty cool songs in the letter L.
When driving long distances it is just easier to stay in one lane and stick to it. Or, so I think. Even more so when you don’t have to make a lot of road changes. In my case, I was on two roads the entire way there.
So, I turned on the cruise control and just drove along in the “thru” lane (left) on the freeways the entire way there. But, since I haven’t driven long distances in a while it was interesting to see how the traffic interacted. For instance, when you are driving faster than another car in your lane it will change lanes out of courtesy to let you by. To me, this just took my off guard.
However, this happened all day. People would move out of the lane to let me by and then move back once I was gone. To me it was just interesting. Even on the way back it was the same thing. Well, until you reached gridlock, then the rules change from “The road is free” to pure Darwinism.
So, it got me to wondering about something. Yeah, I wondered about a lot of stuff when I was driving yesterday. A couple weeks ago I read an article about how the United Way called Minnesota #1 in their “state of caring” list. Does that translate to driving as well? I know that even from the little bit that I have been home that the culture here is much different than that of Seattle.
But, overall, I was just really surprised about how people would get out of the way for other drivers on the road. It kinda of took me off guard. Of course, this might be more noticeable because I was driving more of a distance, but who knows. I still think that it is nice that people will get out of the way when they know they are going slower than you are.