Honk if You Think You're Great

I experienced something today that made me want to make the noise that Charley frequently makes in John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley (ha, now you have to read it), because I couldn't think of any adequate language to properly display my rage. This disagreeable experience was Saturday traffic in Utah. I am fully aware that every location which contains vehicles and the morons who drive them claim that a neighboring location containing vehicles, and therefore additional morons, contains the worst, most moronic drivers ever. Even so, I really, really, really have to assert that Utah's urban drivers are the worst: continentally, globally, maybe even universally. Ladies and gentlemen, if the folks in L.A. drove like Utahns, it would be a bloodbath. They don't signal. They won't merge. They fly up to stop signs and red lights and then slam on their brakes; they speed through yellow lights; they make left turns into the middle and right lanes; they speed during rainy or icy conditions; they dodge into other lanes and cut each other off to exit first, honking and glaring all the way; and when there's construction? Oh Lord. They just don't get it. And don't get me started about their parking etiquette.

During the pre-Olympics construction in December 2000, I thought Salt Lake Valley's transportation world was going to end. Not only could the drivers not handle it, but the Utah Highway Department left me in extreme doubt of its qualifications to be planning and carrying out road construction. I was driving up from San Diego, North on I-15, desperate to get to my family for Christmas, and there was NO SIGN to indicate the butchered exit to I-80, not one. Nothing said "Go West to Frisco" or "I-80 East to Cheyenne" or "Get the Hell Out of Our State Until We're Done with This." At one point, I was detoured on a detour that crimped around in a seriously shady part of downtown and put me back on the freeway at a point before the detour began. Yes. Only in Utah. In their defense, it's probably because a growing number of them aren't even licensed. No, wait. I'm sure I had a better traffic experience in Guadalajara.

Three things made my day, though: pumpkin ice cream at Leatherby's, adorable new zip-up Totes snowboots, and Morg and I both seeing a guy stick his finger up his nose at the precise moment his wife drove over a speed bump in the mall parking lot. She was, of course, going way too fast.