Ok, so I can’t leave road signs alone. Let us just agree that when I see a sign that causes a reaction you may find an article in the blog dealing with my thoughts. So, this morning I passed a sign that said “Special Driving Zone Ahead”, what does that mean? Will I feel special when I am driving through it? Are there going to be unusual obstacles ahead that I might need to drive around or through. What makes that particular driving zone… SPECIAL. Maybe they could give me a clue about what is special about that particular zone. I am now wondering if there might be other special driving zones that do not have existing signs that would let you know that you are about to enter one. Should we have a working definition of what special is and then review areas that could qualify for that designation and erect signs accordingly. I am pretty sure that in the Road Sign manual that you can get online or at your local DMV they do not specify what “special” is. I will leave that to the road sign people. They are probably wishing that I hadn’t mentioned the one Special Driving Zone sign that I am talking about. If so, maybe it is time to fish or cut bait… so to speak. Make a decision… Special Driving Zone or not… remove the signs so that people like me don’t raise the question… what makes a zone SPECIAL? Enough, enough… I guess I suffer from Road Sign Fatigue…the inability to read a road sign and not move on. Not question what it means or overthink the whole road sign thing. I am not going to say that I am finally done with road signs. Not yet.
Another Driving Quirk
I don’t think I have ADD or anything like that. I am not generally having difficulty focusing, have a problem paying attention, am absentminded or have a short attention span. All those sound like a senior citizen…I am one of those. The quirk that I am going to talk about is counting Prime Semi Trucks on the highway. I used to just count semi’s. I would check the clock in the car and count 100 semi’s and see how long it took. Then I could estimate the total number of semi’s on the road over say an hour or several hours. It was a distraction and only a little annoying to Kathy. A few years ago, I moved away from just counting semi’s to only counting Prime Semi’s. I have found out a few things. First of all. you can’t really go anywhere on a freeway for any period of time and not pass at least one Prime Truck… a 53-footer. The ones I have seen come in three different color profiles. Black with a blue swish, white with a blue swish or the most common, blue with a white swish. Since I started, now I can’t stop. It has reached the point that I will drive from my sons in Brentwood to Turlock and tell him I arrived home safely and then give him the number of Prime trucks I passed. At least I tell him I got home safely before I report the truck count. Now I have found that you cannot really count Prime trucks at night so I am now limiting my night time driving. Not totally because of the inability to get an accurate count on Prime Trucks but it is safer to drive in the daytime…. right? One last point and this is strictly for the Prime Truck Count Aficionado. Occasionally, you will pass one where you least expect it. I left Brentwood one day heading for Turlock. There is a secondary road named Byron Highway. A narrow two lane not frequented by Semis. I actually passed a Prime Truck on that road. This was a little shocking. It caught me by surprise. I wasn’t ready to start counting on that trip. My point is that you must remain vigilant at all times because you never know when you might pass a Prime Truck. The driver of the Prime Truck may have made a wrong turn or his GPS wasn’t working or for some other reason he found himself in the wrong place. The good news is he didn’t elude “The Count”.
Let’s face it… it can be boring on the road. Little distractions like stupid road signs and counting Prime Trucks can be a welcome way to take one’s mind off of the humdrum experience. I am actually thinking of working on a plan to project the Prime truck count for any given distance. Example… if I drive from Turlock to Los Angeles on 99 and I-5 what is the estimated number of Prime trucks that I would pass. Then we could determine estimates between any two points on the map. Just a thought. Once again you are probably wondering why I am taking my valuable time to discuss something like this. Maybe not… maybe you know me well enough to say… it figures.
