Driving me mad...

Well I don’t know how you spent the holiday weekend, but I spent it having time for rest and relaxation in the Brew City…Milwaukee. I even got to visit the custard shop from “Lavern and Shirley.” But when it was time to make the trip down to Chi-town again I found my self in a familiar position: fighting traffic.
While I like many things about Chicago, the traffic isn’t one of them, more specifically the people who cause the traffic (aka the drivers). So many people here would be dead if they drove in Alaskan Winters. Jeff Foxworthy once joked that if you could drive 70 miles an hour through whiteout conditions without flinching, you might be Alaskan. While his joke is an exaggeration, it comes with a huge splinter of truth. Alaskans by and large are REALLY GOOD drivers when compared to Illinois drivers. We drive slower, with better control, and we exhibit much less “fear” on the road. Alaskans know how to drive in rain, sleet, snow, and shine. We don’t “jack-rabbit” through stop-lights, we don’t run them, we don’t cut people off, and we don’t flip people off. We are cool, calm, collected drivers. So when I go down the high way and I see guys on “crotch-rockets” popping wheelies, or when people zip in and out of lanes at 100 miles an hour (literally), I get mildly disturbed.
Perhaps it is because everyone is in a hurry here. Gotta beat the rush, and in the process create a rush. In fact when you are in Alaska you can tell who is a tourist and who is a local. Alaskans always pause before they proceed through a green light when they’ve been waiting. People from the “Lower 48” always step on gas when the light turns green. Alaskans know that people can’t always stop in the wintertime (when you hit ice, sometimes stopping isn’t an option), so we always just give it a look before we take off. Try it here in Illinois and the person behind you lays on the horn like he’s got a pregnant wife about to give birth.

The bottom line I wish these folks would learn how to drive something else other than driving me crazy…