This summer I drove all over the place rode a long long ways as friends and family drove me around. We went out to visit family in Iowa and headed onward to South Dakota. We then headed back east across Minnesota and Wisconsin before going back to the Quad Cities.
Along the lines with my previous post, after a while the scenery does tend to blend together, but there are always a lot of nice old houses, churches and bridges to see everywhere you go.
America is a beautiful place.
Oh, and it can also be shit scary. Take this beast that we passed on the highway:
That thing was sitting on the back of a flatbed trailer truck, wheels barely contained and all. You see that kind of shit all the time. During the 3 weeks I was home I'd say I passed within inches of being scraped to pieces by at least 10 heavy earth movers being carried by semis, and always there are gargantuan SUVs and pickups hurtling along no matter where you are and what time you're driving. Hell, this trip my family drove past a house being carried along the highway, while it was storming all around with possible tornado weather.
And it hit me.
No, not a truck. I mean a thought. I realized something.
It had been kind of percolating in the back of my head for a while, but it finally came together.
Driving in America is just kinda scary. And not scary in the way that driving in some Asian countries can be, where you have a constant stream of scooters vying for space in narrow roads.
Roads in America are scary because of the fuck you attitude, no-holds-barred driving style of most Americans. In addition to not really paying attention to the road, a lot of drivers in the US feel like every time they get behind the wheel it's a test of their machismo - will they back down or not? They technically follow the rules, but drive just enough like a maniac to be dangerous.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying driving in Japan is safe, either. In Japan there are tons of auto related deaths every year and tons of accidents, and IMO it's mostly caused by people not even looking around at all. People don't pay any attention. But when they do see you they drive relatively safely.
In the US it's a whole different ball game. There seems to be this antagonistic/sloppy/distracted attitude to driving that makes everyone feel like they're the only one who knows what's going on, but everyone better damn watch out or there'll be hell to pay. I have literally seen people slam into other cars simply because they had the right of way and piss off to the other driver who got in the path they were hurtling along.
I also saw several times on this trip people either staring at cellphones while driving, or turing here and there and changing lanes without even an ounce of effort to make sure the other lane is clear. And you have the drunks; crazy public drunkenness ordinances combined with relatively lenient DUI laws ensure many many many people get killed by drunk bastards every year.
I don't know. Maybe there's not much point to this rant, just that I find driving in the US to be a little scary in a very American way.
Oh, and on a final note, another thing you see all over the place in the US is nuclear power plants.
Ugly, looming power plants.
[ All taken with my GXR A16. ]
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