Today’s Clover: The Wanderer (May 2, 2018)

You pronounced the name of that car wrong. It’s a Slo-lara, driven by 70 year old everywhere. I’ve literally seen some one here driving one of those come to a complete stop at the end of an on ramp where you got your own lane for at least 1000 ft. Don’t ask me how that made any sense.

I’ve been seen a lot of “On Ramp Crawl” clovers recently. I often get on a large east-west interstate to drive 8 miles to work. The traffic flows at around 75-80 mph, even though it’s posted 70.

During commute hours, the traffic merging onto the highway will stack up in the on ramp, with the lead clover never accelerating above 40 mph, despite having an on-ramp literally a half mile long to get to up speed. The lead clover is almost always driving a Prius, a PT Cruiser, or a Honda CRV.

By the time this clover cluster gets to the Interstate, fully-loaded semi trucks are bearing down at 75 mph, and then they (the clovers) try to merge in going 45-50. The semis usually swerve into the middle lane when they can to let the clover or clovers creeeeeeep into the right lane.

Because there is only enough of a gap at that speed differential to let one or two cars on, I am stuck having to floor it from 40 mph and take my chances by dipping hard into the middle and left lanes, getting up to 80+ as fast as possible.

Now the clover cluster has endangered all of our safety (for real) and are totally oblivious to this fact, probably thinking that merging at 40 was the saaaaaaa-fffff-eeeee thing to do.

Just unreal.

In NH they drive on the paved shoulders all of the time. Especially a night with oncoming traffic. They slow down and drive on the shoulder. It’s surreal. Even the cops do it.

You misunderstand. He is so “happy” about his “babe-magnet” convertible, his 24″-er is getting caught up in the steering wheel. And he must go slow so everyone gets to see how fantastic he is in it. The 3-lane weaving is just to make sure no one passes him and gets to the “babes” before can dazzle them with his “brilliance”!

This made me think of my mother’s parents. Neither could drive a nail up their butts. My grandfather was oblivious to whatever was behind him. Never saw him move to the right when there was a passing lane. My grandmother was a terror I only rode with twice that I recall. She never broke 30 mph and I was terrified. Neither of them drank or took any meds. No doubt they’d both been more comfortable with the mules hitched to the wagon. They didn’t need to stinkin a/c.

I guess I got my driving skills from my father since my mother was cut from the same mold as her mom and one of her older sisters NEVER drove, a good thing for her and everyone else.

My father drove a Model T pickup when he and his boss at the mercantile store made a run to Odessa, a 175 miles of dirt road and he never poked when I was alive.

We’d take extended family vacations and have a caravan of cars, often doing close to 100mph across 400 miles of west Texas roads and nobody ever thought twice about it. We had a long way to go and a short time to get there.

Back in those days there was radar but the radar had to be stopped and aimed across the road. You could see those big old Fury’s for miles and we’d slow down, cross their beam and speed back up. I wanna go home….cue Bobby Bare.

It is quite possible the clover is indeed drunk. Or dealing with a side effect of medicine.

The flip side of “all over the road” clover is the “double yellow is really a jersey barrier” clover. I encounter these guys on my bicycle all the time. They absolutely will not give you the (state law required) 3 feet of space when passing if there’s a double yellow even though there’s no traffic in the oncoming lane. Like that yellow line is somehow going to blow their tires or something. They’re almost universally old guys, so I don’t think they’re texting or otherwise distracted. I think it’s a throwback to the idealized GM Futurama world where cars were the only things moving and not a pedestrian could be found anywhere. They learned to drive in that time and so think that everyone not in a car should be removed from the roads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk0iw-PlzXc

I can attest to bad Virginia drivers. I live in the Chicago area and I manage to not get into accidents, even with our many clovers. Was in Virginia last year and I didn’t even make it 24 hours before I got clobbered by one of yours. I wasn’t even moving at the time (at a stop sign) either……… Thankfully it was a rental car.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the large percentage of people there (near DC) employed by the government? The kind of people that end up “working” in the public sector are of a very different breed then those of us that have to work in the real world. The geezer that hit me was a retired defense drone (had a old expired pentagon parking sticker).

Though that doesn’t explain Michigan drivers. Another state with really bad drivers. Thankfully Michigan is not terribly congested, otherwise the death toll would be enormous.

Bent Mountain Road??