| Friday November 29th, 2002 Once again I'm on my way out of town this weekend to visit my girlfriend, setting off into a wintery blizzard presuming things don't clear up before this evening. When I went last weekend, traffic wasn't moving faster than 80kms for the first half of the trip, I spotted a couple of vehicles that had gone into the ditch, and at one point I passed a deer that was, thankfully, already most of the way across the road and no longer in my lane. LA's brother works for the transportation ministry and was able to verify for her my claim that my driving record is absolutely clean - not a single parking ticket, speeding ticket, nothing, in the dozen years I've been driving. Now, there was that one bump the parking lot that did about two hundred bucks in damage to the other car, but I was able to settle that amicably since I already knew the person. Someday I hope to be like that retired bus driver I helped move to his new home as one of my odd summer jobs in highschool, who kept pleasantly reminiscing about his perfect driving record. I suppose it's not a bad thing to be proud of. Having been brought up in northern Ontario, I do know a thing or two about winter driving - or at least I like to think I know more than your typical Ottawa civilian, who either speeds off the road due to a reckless pace, or begins dragging their figurative heels for the duration of the season once the first flake of snow brushes their windshield. There really isn't that much more snow here than there was there, suprisingly enough; much of what I learned came from living with my parents on a little back country road that was rarely properly plowed and often doubled as a snowmobile trail. What I lacked was experience with driving on busy, muli-laned freeways. When I first moved to Ottawa ('the big city'), I avoided our Queensway like the plague - it was a certain deathtrap and I'd take any other route across town that I could, regardless whether that meant taking twice as long to get there. These days, I pull on without thinking about it - usually literally. Once, I would have been concentrating my utmost to achieve perfect unison with the flow of traffic - now I'm more concerned with daydreaming about being with LA again, or how to get a better score on my Xbox. It doesn't hurt to remind myself of that now and then - a reality check hurts a lot less than an accident. |