Traffic

My foray eastward has ended and we’ve all come out unscathed. My purpose in this venture was three-fold. First , to spend time with a good friend in St. Cloud, second, transport Glen to Benson, MN where he visited one of his many aging, distant relatives (I actually dropped him off in Alexandria) and third, to go to Minneapolis and gain some much needed experience driving on roads with real traffic.
It may seem strange to drive all the way to Minneapolis to get experience driving, however, I learned to drive in the middle of a field and most of my driving has been on flat, straight gravel roads and two-lane highways with little to no traffic. It is quite possible to drive ten or twenty miles and not see another vehicle on the road and I’m often tempted to tie the steering wheel in place with a bit of string, place a brick on the accelerator and indulge in a good book. The roads really are that flat and straight in places!!
My experiences with city traffic have been mostly of sitting white-knuckled and wide-eyed in the passenger seat, bracing my foot against an imaginary brake in the floor board as Mike sailed down the freeway at high speed with traffic on all four sides. Mike was unfazed even by the signs that read “Warning: Aggressive driver high crash area ahead.” Those signs reinforced my conviction that if humans had been intended to travel at such high speed in such close proximity to one another, God would have made us of something much less fragile than flesh and bone. I was terrified of traffic. But sooner or later we must all face our fears, so off I went to Minneapolis.
And how did it go? I'm still alive....and I'll tell more later.