I hate driving in the East Bay...

This morning I woke up at 5am, then drove my mother & brother the 51 miles to Oakland Airport. (Link goes to driving directions. :) They're going down to Disneyland till late Monday, which means I actually get the house to myself for a change! Actually, to be very honest, this is the first time I've actually not been around somebody else for any sustained period of time...says something about how sheltered my life has been (or rather about how little my family trusts me) considering I'm 26...

Anyway: the drive there wasn't too terrible, but coming back was a nightmare. Even before I had left the airport grounds, some asshat decided to see if he could kill me off and almost succeeded. Two separate lanes coming out of the terminal dropoff area merged with one another, and the driver in the other lane refused to let me go ahead or behind him -- speeding up and slowing down so I couldn't merge! I ended up slamming on my brakes and veering behind him, not out of a conscious decision to drive defensively so much as because I saw Mr. Concrete Barrier looming and didn't want to be crunched. Asshat!

That rattled me sufficiently that I managed to miss my turn onto the freeway, and wound up driving aimlessly around Oakland for a while. Okay, I admit, I usually miss the turn onto the freeway, largely because the streets near that airport are, to quote Zork, "a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." Where each of the several lanes goes, exactly, is only vaguely marked, so it is entirely possible to wind up in Oakland, on the other side of the Bay Bridge in SF, or en route to Sacramento just at the first set of turnoffs. If you survive those just fine, and aren't used to the area, you then have the option of getting stuck in Berkeley, shunted off across a bridge to the North Bay, or up in Point Richmond, where nobody wants to be.

At the Richmond-San Rafael bridge, because my driving hadn't been enough of a disaster, I dropped the toll on the floor as I was approaching the gates at 60mph and discovered, very much the hard way, that my car will happily veer off in whatever direction it happens to be going if I let go of the steering wheel. I'm not sure exactly how that works, because normally steering favors only one side, not both! So, having changed lanes rather abruptly and scared a poor tourist from Texas in the process, I grabbed my mini-manpurse and the requisite two dollars rather than continuing to discover how fast my car can get me killed.

I'd like to ask: what kind of nut came up with the idea of merging 10 tollbooths into two lanes in under 100 feet? Yes, we go from 4 - 6 lanes of traffic, to a TON of tollbooths, then two lanes. On a highway, might I add, that is used by two kinds of people aside from me: rabid ubercommuters and huge shipping trucks. Sometimes I wonder if California is trying to thin the population via vehicular roulette.

One of these days, I need to take a picture of the Richmond-San Rafael bridge while approaching the Southbound (lower) deck. Know how every university has a building with some kind of weird design trait and an accompanying myth about why it was built that way? Well, the RSR bridge is a real case of engineering gone horribly wrong. (AFAIK that is. It sure looks like one.) The two sides were started simultaneously but a slight whoopsie made them not only not naturally meet in the middle, but not even come close. So what we got is a bridge that is warped both horizontally and vertically. It looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book.

Anyway, once across the funky bridge, I decided to drink the soda my brother had grabbed for me on his way out of the house. Yeech! Bleah! NASTY! Normally that brand (a "store" brand) is good, but this stuff was horrid. It was supposed to be peach, but tasted like battery acid. Kyle can verify this, as I made him try it on the way to Santa Rosa this evening, just to see if it was just that my sense of tase is skewed. *snicker*

On that tangent, it seems that my sense of taste has suddenly fine-tuned itself. *looks bewildered* I spent 26 years thinking that vanilla and cream/milk were the same flavor, now suddenly they're quite distinctly different. Rather sucks, I now don't find vanilla milkshakes appealing, because it's the cream flavor I was going after! :-p

Okay, I think I've rambled enough for now... I'd be replying email, except both my neck and my head hurt at the moment, so I'm just trying to find other less difficult things to do online.

Posted by moggy at August 30, 2003 07:21 PM | TrackBack