Why is it?

With still more to write in the "Living Memories Tour," I stopped writing anything else and wasn't writing that either. Sometimes that just happens when life starts truly happening again.

There is a lot to the saying "Those who can't do, teach," but the cause effect is twisted. I've been teaching the last few months and what with preparing for classes, participating in "other duties as assigned," and particularly the endless grading, I haven't had time to "do" much else.

What else I have been doing, if I ever get around to writing about it, could be the theme of yet another blog but for this one, let me just say that it has taken me to Ohio, particularly Gahanna, Ohio, repeatedly over the same period of time that I've been teaching.

In fact, it is the most recent drive back from Gahanna that inspired this blog entry.

I don't know whether it is just Ohio drivers or the fact that cars just move faster on relatively straight dual lane highways but I never seem to have problems with slow drivers until I get to WV 47. Now most non-expressway roads in WV follow the curves of the hills, or worse the waterways and sometimes both. In fact, the straightest sections of most of these roads are generally the ones that go straight up or down one of those hills but on the other side, it's usually back to the curves.

All of this just means that you expect to go slower on these roads, at least around the many curves. But tonight, in the dark, I got behind a car that appeared to be carrying eggs, loose, not in cartons. I say this because the this car started out very slowly from the last stop light, where I had the misfortune to catch up with it, and never got up to the approved speed limit. (I assume this was because the driver didn't want to slow too abruptly for the next curve because of all those loose eggs.) Unfortunately, this was on the parts of WV 47 in Wood and Wirt County before the curves have suggested speeds of 20 to 35 MPH, the stretch of road that I could make good time, if I weren't behind the egg car.

At the light I wasn't directly behind it. There was another car between us. It took this car all of 500 yards to pass the egg car and it's driver didn't even wait for the dashed lines. I was too far back to take advantage of the next set of dashed center lines and then there just didn't seem to be any--for miles.

While I've driven this road several times since I started teaching and know it well, I generally plug in my Garmin to give me an estimated arrival time. All while I was trapped behind the egg car, I could see my estimated arrival time creep up--by minutes, which made the time I was trapped seem like hours.

To top it off, the car is riding the center line, which makes it even more difficult for me to look ahead and see whether or not there are some dashes in my immediate future. Finally, by creeping even further into the oncoming lane than the driver ahead of me, I saw some dashed lines. What does the egg car do? It speeds up. The only time it approached the speed limit was when I could have passed. My 2001 Ford Ranger XLT on its best day could not build up passing speed and catch up in the time the lines were available so I stayed behind it still longer.

Finally, there were some dashed lines up one of those hills. I floored the accelerator. I passed the egg car! By the time the egg car crested the hill behind me I was already so far in front and around some curves that I wouldn't have been able to see its headlights, which was good. I would have hated to see them turn off behind me.