One Thing I Really Like About Pensacola
As I was driving along an unfamiliar highway around 11 on a Friday night in Seattle, it occurred to me how tame the driving in Pensacola is. For some reason, the traffic lanes on the highway in Seattle are narrower than in other countries. You get used to it, but it’s like the whole personal space thing; when first invaded, the adrenalin starts rushing.
In Seattle, there are just too many cars for the roads to handle with grace. Same as Kuwait. When I first got to Qatar, the roads were adequate, but no longer.
Pesacola is sweet. You can get anywhere you need to be in under half an hour. From the airport to my house is like 8 minutes, max. My house to the shops, my house to the YMCA, my house to church – all about eight minutes. There are a lot of stop signs and a lot of stop lights, and I rarely see anyone run them. I never see traffic gridlock. There is one really dangerous intersection in town, and I rarely see a problem there.
It’s not that driving in Pensacola is so consciously mannerly, as in Seattle. It’s just more laid back. No one seems to be in that great a hurry to get anywhere. Every child is in a car seat. People are careful, even if they are driving while impaired.
You can get spoiled. When you get used to calm driving, then just about anywhere you go with real traffic seems chaotic. Once you have a large number of people on the road, you increase the chances of running into a cowboy (or cowgirl), or an inexperienced driver, or a half-blind older driver, etc.
Driving in Pensacola is just uneventful. 🙂
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looooool uneventful driving experiences are *great*. I loved driving in Pensacola!
There is something to be said about living in the country.
Come back here and drive some more, Little Diamond! 🙂
LOL, Pensacolians might be insulted at being called ‘country’ Suwanee! it’s just quiet driving, that’s all!
After living in Washington DC for many years,I think Olympia is uneventful. It only gets bad when you get around Tacoma and north. I find Washington drivers in general more polite than east coast megolopolis drivers who are aggressive and seem to take it as a personal affront that you want to be ahead of them. Southern drivers in general seem to be tamer, except maybe in the metro areas.
LOL, or the occasional macho-man who takes exception to a woman driver who passes or wants to take the right of way . . . . Mostly the Southern drivers are polite – not so elaborately polite as Seattle, but polite.