So much for compliance

I was coming out of my school’s driveway on Wednesday and stopped at the red light.  (My school is on a main road, so the exit has a stop light.)   When the light turned green, I was looking to the left and saw the car coming towards me come to a stop, so I proceeded through the light.  I glanced to the right and saw an SUV with yellow flashing lights coming towards the intersection.   I figured that since there was no audible siren, and the lights were not red and blue, that the vehicle was not an emergency vehicle so it would stop at the red light.  Imagine my surprise when it just sailed right through the intersection, forcing me into the middle lane to stomp on my brakes.  One block past the intersection they turned off their lights and proceeded like nothing was wrong.

Now, maybe I’m wrong, but I thought there was a reason certain public vehicles were not given the blue and red flashing light bars with loud, obnoxious sirens.  Yellow flashing lights are supposed to mean “Watch out for me, I’m here parked on the side of the road checking to make sure this sewer is not backing up.” and red (with or without blue) flashing lights mean “Get the hell out of my way, I’m trying to save someone’s life.”

I was even more surprised when I saw the tag on the back.

Guess they only need to make sure everyone else is in compliance, not themselves.

Strolling through the park one day......

If you don't know that I'm not a big fan of driving while on the phone, then you're either new or haven't been paying attention. I'm not sure why we, as a society, tolerate it any more than we tolerate drunk driving - studies have shown it's every bit as dangerous. Anyway, I'm taking my walk around Sugarhouse park today, walking opposite the direction of traffic because I like to look people in the face as I pass them. 3/4 of the way around the park I see this car coming towards me, and the driver is not only talking on the phone, but also reading at the same time. While driving through a park. Where a bunch of kids are running around, not to mention bikers, joggers, walkers and skaters. When are we going to put some teeth into our laws so that these people can be pulled over and told that this is just not OK? We have a distracted driving law on the books with two fatal flaws. It does not state any specific behavior as an example of distractred drivingand it's only enforcable as a secondary infraction. You cannot be pulled over for distracted driving, but if you cause an accident or are pulled over for speeding you can be cited for it. I thought laws were supposed to be preventative, not punitive. Secondary infraction laws are punitive, not preventative, because nobody thinks that they're going to cause an accident. It's like having drunk driving laws that are secondary to vehicular homicide. Don't kill anyone and you're OK, but if you run someone over we're really going to slap it to you for being drunk.

If I were a paranoid-schizophrenic I'd think they were all after me....

At the risk of beating this issue to death, I had yet another incident while driving today. I'm trying to leave out the mundane, run of the mill stupid, arrogant maneuvers. But this one was a fresh new look on brain dead. Coming out of the Smith's on 9th & 9th, there is clearly an in and an out, and both of them are wide enough for 2 cars, one turning left, the other turning right. As I'm leaving, wanting to turn right, there are two cars as far left as possible, exactly where they should be to turn left. Virginia Subaru up front isn't signaling, the Camry (or whatever) behind is signaling right, but in Utah that doesn't mean anything, so I pull to the right of them positioning myself to turn right. I was driving the LTD Convertible, and didn't even have to hop the curb to get around them, that's how far to the left they were. Camry honks as I go by, like I was supposed to sit back there until I was 100% sure which of the conflicting cues was correct. I ignore it. Just as I'm about to pull out into traffic, dumbass Virginia Subaru blares his horn at me and cuts me off, taking a right turn from the left lane, right in front of me, all the while talking on his cell phone. So I honk back and, as I pass him as he pulls into a parking space, yell something about hanging up the phone and driving. He honks again and flips me the bird. I verbalize the finger back at him and head off home. 2 fer 1 deal on boneheads @ Smith's today.

The Trip : The overall view.

Click on the map to get a bigger view, and to activate links.

Saturday, June 14th : Day 7

Same as with day 6, >click here to read the blog and see the pictures.

Friday, June 13th : Day 6

Well, day 6 was so chocked full of stuff to look at that by the time I got to 11 pictures and hadn't even been through the Death Valley set, I decided there was no way I was going to fit them all on here. This gave me the freedom to go overboard, and ended up with 41 photos for today. To see the post and the pictures, we have to go off Blogger and onto my personal page. Just click here, and I'll take you there. And, just like here on Blogger, if you click on any picture, it will give you the full sized one. At the bottom of the post will be a link to bring you right back here. Sorry about the detour, have a great day.

Thursday, June 12th : Day 5

We left Salt Lake sometime around 10 or 11, and headed out to Wendover. Nothing too exciting there, it was the usual I-80 drive, except I did find out that they had fenced in the "Tree of Utah" so you couldn't get to ti to pee on it anymore. Another tradition bites the dust.
At Wendover, which is directly over the Nevada/Utah border, we got off the freeway and headed down SR93, a 2 lane highway typical of American travel before the advent of the divided freeway. Thanks to the freeway, these types of roads are free of idiots and quite enjoyable to drive. We headed down 93 to Ely then took 6 all the way to Tonopah. [I was reading it right off the map Alex, that's the only reason I got it right]. One thing we discovered on our drive across Nevada is that it consists of several rows of mountains, or hills, seperated by logn, long, long stretches of incredible flat lands. Hence, the roads are long, long, long stretches of perfectly straight road broken up by the occasional 2 mile curvy ride through the hills.
About 12 miles before Ely, we hit the town of McGill, NV. Not a very big town, and it looked like it was on it's way to becoming a ghost town, or maybe was recovering from being one. Either way, they had a bunch of cool stores for sale, with the old time look to them. Alex and I decided we could probably get one for a song, so our latest plan is to buy a store and set up shop. We haven't decided what we're going to sell, Alex thought of T-Shirts that say "I bought this store in McGill and all I got was this stupid T-Shirt". I pictured the episode of "Dharma & Greg" where she opens up a shop but doesn't sell anything. The store is full of people just sitting, chatting and drinking coffee, and when people come in and ask what she's selling and her response is "What do you need?" When they answer she'd just yell out to the crowd "Anyone got ...?" Guess you had to be there. But I just pictured us fixing up the place and then spending my summers sitting on the front stoop, watching people go by and chatting. {Keep in mind we were driving through Nevada at the time. You thought there was a whole lot of nothing in my picture of Southern Utah, Nevada's got 2 or 3 times as much nothing.}
Anyway, after that there was Ely, which seems to get an amazing amount of press for such a small town. After Ely we got onto route 6 and headed down toward route 95 which would bring us to Death Valley. We had planned on staying at a campground between Saulsbury and McKinney summits down by the town of Tonopah. On the way down we saw a few dust devils (see picture), a huge lava flow, and smoke from a big fire (see picture). Now, at first the smoke didn’t look too ominous, but after a few minutes took on a very mushroom cloud look to it. Which made me think that the last thing I want to see is a mushroom cloud when I’m driving through the Nevada desert. Well, it wasn’t nuclear (or is that nucular?), but it did seem oddly surrealistic to me.
Oh, and then there was the sand flats. Called “Lunar Crater” on the map, it was what seems to be the bottom of a dry lake bed. In class I told someone that I thought it was about 30 miles long and 10 miles wide, but I checked it out on Google Maps and found I was just a tad off. By like a factor of 10. It really is only about 3 ½ miles long and a mile and a half wide, but driving on it it seemed to go on forever. We got the car going up to about 100 MPH, and did some really cool sideways slides, at a much lower speed of course. We got a ton of good pictures, that I put into a sort of video. As Alex brought the car back from the first round of dust running, I was taking the pictures, the first thing we said was “Danny’s gonna love this” (that’s our little brother, the 3 of us have been hanging around together for, well, most of our lives). So, we’re hoping to get together a long weekend with all of us out there for some playing. No speed limit, nobody to bug us, and as long as we don’t blow anything up or harass the cattle we’ll be left alone. After we decided we were wasting too much gas (forgot to fill up in Ely) we headed out to the camp ground. Which was totally underwhelming (see picture). Nothing but gravel and a couple little trees, right off the highway. Uh, thanks, but no. We headed down to Tonopah, got a hotel room, had some dinner, checked out the town and bunkered down for the night.

Oh, and Alex, feel free to comment on anything I miss. I want to get everything on here, and I'm bound to forget something.....

If you've ever driven the Shafer trail you'll get this...

If you haven't, then click on the picture in the previous post. It'll send you to some pictures of the drive down the trail. Entire story to come later.....
And Writer - There's a reason I didn't post your comment - you'll understand when I post it.

Once in a million years, at least since the mid- 80's

So I'm coming home from Church today, down in the Sandy area. I get on I-215 at Union Park Drive and follow the belt route all the way to I-15 and the 1300 East exit. What, about 15, maybe 20 miles? I'll have to check sometime. But anyway, something amazing, something I'm not used to, something that used to be possible in the 70's here in Salt Lake happened. I drove all that way without once being blocked by some idiot going slow in the fast lane. Not once. I didn't even have to scoot around anyone on the right hand side to get past them. The only 2 people in the left lane moved over before I even had to disengage the cruise control. WOW.

It finally happened.

D & R (aka General Chaos and White Lioness) borrowed my Subaru for a couple days a while back and they both asked me if I ever had reactions to my bumper stickers. Seems that both of them had some smartass mimic cell phone useage in an ovious attempt to mock the bumper stickers. I don't know if I had just been oblivious to the mockings or if it just never happened, but I honestly told them "no". Until today. I'm driving down 13th east headed to the Home Depot, and right after crossing I-80, I hear someone honking. Looking over to the right I see these two highschool guys in their parents new Yukon, swerving in and out of traffic, honking at me, talking on their cell phones and flipping me off. And who said teenagers were idiots? Anyways, I just laughed, flipped them off, downshifted, slid to the right and passed a blockade right before the right lane ended and left them in the dust. Well, until the light at Highland Drive. They passed me turning left onto Highland, leaning out the window screaming something at me. I had the air on and all the windows up so I didn't hear, and just kept looking forward with my finger at the window at them. But I did post their plate number on this great site Danny got me hooked on called PlateWire. If you're looking for a way to vent frustration with bad drivers without resorting to road rage, you ought to check it out. Gives me a better outlet - I have it bookmarked over on the left for future reference, if you need it.