Well, like most of my life, my trip became instantly less sexy. I got screwed over by the “or similar” part of the car rental contract and instead of getting a Mustang like I had hoped, I got a Ford Taurus.
Nice car, but not a Mustang.
Either way I arrived in Pittsburgh (check the photos section for some cute pictures of my friends Tim and Christie’s baby). Couple quick Pittsburgh observations. One is the strange driving techniques. The drivers here are generally very timid, which just seems odd for such a big city. For example, when getting on to the highway via the on-ramp, drivers will frequently not only slow down in attempting to merge, but come to a complete stop. I have almost rear ended at least 5 people because of this technique.
I’m not sure if this stems from the way the roads themselves here are constructed, but they kind of go hand in hand (chicken or the egg sort of thing). I have never seen so many 8 way stops in my life. It is literally like 4 seperate road crews were building and suddenly bumped into each other one day and went “oh. Well how are we going to get out of this? I’ve got it, put in a stop light there, three way stop here, just a left turn light over there, and make these four one-way for no apparent reason.” I should also point out that usually these roads are at about a 74 degree angle at this point too.
My brother has been living in the Harrisburg area for a little over a year now, and from what he and a friend of his who had also lived there after living in the Midwest say, Pennsylvanians just don’t know how to drive. Or at least the rules are grossly dissimilar to the rules in the Midwest and include things like stopping randomly and driving down a busy street with your high beams on.
On family road trips, my dad used to point at cows and say things like, “Look! It’s an alligator in disguise!” I think you can do the same with your Ford Taurus, a.k.a. your Mustang going incognito.
Looks like a Mustang to me . . , you just gotta ignore the two extra doors, the front wheel drive, the cushy suspension, the old pushrod Vulcan V6 under the hood, the big back seat, the generic styling, the blue oval instead of gallopping pony on the grill, and so on and so forth. I can hardly tell the difference.
In the ironic news of the weekend, my uncle from Colorado was here representing the company he works for at a job fair on campus, and he rented a car to drive from O’hare down to Champaign . . . and it was a Mustang, which wasn’t what he was supposed to get.
I get rental cars from the company for day trips all the time, and I’ve gotten the Ford Taurus once, but last time, I got the Volkswagon Pasat Automatic but you could slide the shifter over into manual mode, which was really weird because there was no clutch, but you could basically video game control what gear you were in. (No, the car computer didn’t allow me to try go get of the line in 5th gear.)
Crazy
Ok, your comment on the driving practices of Pittsburgians are SO indicative of the fact that you grew up in Michigan!!!! Driving in MI after learning how to in PA was a huge shock to the system, only the other way around!
Please, Beth. You talk as if people from Pennsylvania drive in a *different* way instead of just the *wrong* way.