Driving on Christmas Day

We drove 180 miles to Newman, California and back on Christmas day. Our drive was relatively uneventful, but one thing we found is that bad drivers don't take the holidays off. We witnessed a broad range of bad drivers including NASCAR wannabes zip-zagging from one lane to the next, to slow-driving ass-holes who don't understand the concept of moving to the right lane on a two-lane highway.

The NASCAR wannabes are easy enough to deal with. Just get out of their way and hope that they don't cause an accident right in front of you. There's no need to place yourself in jeopardy by trying to keep them from cutting you off.

The slow-driving ass-hole is another thing altogether. Highway 5 is a two-lane highway with a speed limit of 70 miles per hour. The proper driving etiquette for two-lane highways requires drivers that drive below the speed limit to move to the right lane. If you are in the left lane and someone comes up behind you and flashes their headlights, the polite thing to do is to either speed up, or move over and let them past. But this one ass-hole we encountered lacked any notion of proper driving etiquette.

He chose to poke along in the left lane and forced several vehicles to pass him on the right. Not an easy thing to do when there is traffic. So when we came up on him, there were too many cars on the right to allow us to pass him on the right. We flashed our headlights and instead of speeding up or moving to the right, he chose to spray us with windshield fluid. When we sounded our horn, he hit his breaks. Now keep in mind that this was on Christmas day AND he had his family in his car. But being an ass-hole was more important than the safety of his family.

Traffic did clear up enough for us to finally get past him on, on the right of course, but not before he tried to cut us off by straddling the line and drifting into our lane. Fortunately, our car was more powerful than the piece-of-shit Kia he was driving, and we left him behind with no further incidents.

As his car receded in the rear-view mirror, my silent farewell to him was "Merry Christmas motherfucker. You keep driving like that, and you and your family won't even make it to the New Year."