A message from the husband - Driving in Knoxville

Hey all!
If there's one thing you've done a lot of coming from southern California, it's driving. Driving to the grocery store, driving to see friends, driving to/from LA. Everyone does it and, excluding those who are asian, elderly, female (choose two), everyone can do it pretty well. But driving in Knoxville is, to say the least, an adventure.

Let's begin. So say you're driving in the right hand lane on the freeway (say, the 405) and suddenly the dashes to your left become short and close together. This would seem to indicate that your lane has become an exit only lane. So if you're getting off at the next exit, no worries! Except suddenly you find yourself driving on the shoulder! What happened? Here, those little short dashes mean that the lane is ending now. Not in 1/4 mile, not in 500ft, but now. More than once I've been caught off guard by this bizarre method.

Nextly, you find yourself driving on a normal suburban road. Nothing in particular about it. Say it's a fairly busy street with many side streets coming off of it. Now your gaze drifts to one of these streets as a car comes towards your road at 30mph. You think, "He has a stop sign. He'll stop." But he doesn't. He keeps going. and going. and going until you think that there is no way they are going to actually be able to stop in time when the SLAM on their brakes, barely out of the way of the right-of-way traffic. Oh my gosh. This scares me every time. People seem to think that they should break at the very last possible minute here. Not just 18yo kids who think they are invincible, but everyone! oh...my...gosh I've thought several times that I was going to get hit. Scarytime.

So that wraps up this edition of Driving in Knoxville. I'm sure that there will be many more to come as I encounter many more things that just don't quite make sense to me.

~Scott