Flada Blog

Do you want to know one of the nice things about my blog’s topic? It leaves me open to write about just about anything and still stay “on topic.” Since I’m writing about my perspective on politics and life, that’s wide open. If it were just about politics, I’d be very limited. “Life” is much broader, though. I’m glad I threw that in there.

So today I’m going to write a little bit about my neighborhood. I may even write a bit about living in Hampton Roads in general since we’ve been here for three years and only have about another two months before we move on.

Drivers

Now a lot of you may not know this, but I’ve traveled pretty extensively. Between serving in the Navy and working in field service, I’ve been to a lot of places and seen a lot of things. I’ve been to places where its almost fun to drive around. Let’s just say that Hampton Roads isn’t one of those place. If not for having seen the occasional car pulled over by police, I would think that this area doesn’t even have traffic laws. I mean, I’ve been to places where drivers were bad, but seriously, this place is a free-for-all. Every complaint that anyone has ever had about anything that other drivers do anywhere, they all happen here–daily! Most drivers here don’t even seem to know that they have a turn signal.

Occasionally someone will discover the lever on the side of their steering column. “What’s this thing do?” They flip the lever. Their right signal comes on. They turn left.

Not signaling at all is bad enough. Signaling the wrong way is just crazy.

Pedestrians

One of the only things worse than the drivers are the pedestrians. We live on a really narrow street in Norfolk. Cars park on both sides which leaves barely enough room for a car to drive one direction. If you don’t fold in the mirrors on your truck when you park, your mirror will become part of the road. That’s not a joke.

Now the thing is, there are actually sidewalks on both sides of the street. Both sides. If you think this would keep people from walking in the narrow road, you would be mistaken. And when you’re driving down the road, if you think the pedestrians would get out of the way and just maybe start using the sidewalk, again you would be mistaken. Yesterday, a bicylcist was riding directly down the geographical center of the street. He must have had some kind of fancy electronic contraption that enabled him to calculate the exact geographical center, because that’s where he was. Did he move to the side when we came along. If you think “yes,” again you would be mistaken.

Now all of that is bad enough, but yesterday we were working on my truck and had it blocking the road for about 5 minutes. What did one driver who couldn’t wait for those five minutes do? He drove up onto the sidewalk to get around. So we have pedestrians on the road and drivers on the sidewalks. I’m not kidding you.