In Which I Drive at Night
Jan. 26th, 2020 08:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_a)*@#$@.
No, everything's OK, but ...
So, when I did my first practice drive in Berkeley in December, I was a little overwhelmed by all the cars, people, bicyclists, and scooterists coming from every which direction. A few different people said, "If you can drive in Berkeley, you can drive anywhere" and I felt good about driving in the quieter, calmer Hawaiian environment.
And there's not the same information overload here, but I really wasn't ready for the two-lane windy up-and-down roads that you travel at 40-50 mph. (Kimberly and I are both continuously amazed at how little we noted the curves, rises, and dips in these roads when we were simple passengers traveling these roads in years past.) I feel like I'm still trying to find my place (and the place of my large car, Julie the Benz) in those lanes, and if I get tired or fatigued I have to fight to maintain that place.
But, day by day and week by week it's getting easier.
Well, the driving is, even on the highway, even on windy, pothole-y Koloa Road.
Sort of.
The parking still feels beyond me because I just don't have a feel on where Julie's right side is: my dad says that generally I seem to think I'm closer on the right than I really am, which I suppose is the right direction to work in from. So today, for example, my dad and I went to the really small, cramped parking lot next to Sheraton Beach, because I'm doing my best not to avoid places just because they intimidate me. And he suggested that he should park the car once he saw the situation there ... and eventually decided he couldn't make it into the parking space we'd spotted, but found an alternative. So he parked there, not I. And then after swimming at the Sheraton, I took Julie out, but I had to do about a 27-point turn to do so. OK, it was maybe 7 or 9 points really, but a bit teeth-gnashing for me. It really, genuinely is a super tight parking lot.
But the driving ...
So I've been wanting to go gaming on Thursday nights, and my dad said he thought we should go out together at night first, and he was so right.
Those fast two-lane roads turn out to be so much worse when there's a stream of cars with headlights coming in the opposite direction. The highway was super stressful, but I think I'll be able to deal with it in the near future. I mean, I had problems when I had a few cars oncoming together, or a few cars at a turn, but the further I went, the better I learned to look away from the headlights. On the way back, I was getting better at watching the shoulder instead of the center line if I needed to. But that's a stressful way to drive at night (at speed) and not at all what I remember from when I was younger.
Every once in a while I'd get 15 or 30 seconds without an oncoming car, and just the dark road lighting up ahead of me, and that was more the quiet solitude and joy I remembered from night driving in the past.
And then there was the fog.
The window fog that is. (We're not in the Bay Area any more.)
Quite a ways up on the highway, my front window started fogging. The AC was running cool, because it has since we've gotten Julie, and so we set to heating things up. But the fog remained. Eventually we realized it was on the outside of the window, a result of the cool window condensing the high humidity outside. The windshield wipers worked a bit, but I was getting overloaded, just like on that first drive, and so I was having troubles figuring out how to get them going.
This was all on the long curve into Lihue, which is one of several places where there's a long stretch of road with no way to pull over, unless you ditch your car in what's probably still a muddy morass where it'll need to be towed. So I was getting a little stress about my window that was getting gradually less transparent.
Fortunately my dad was able to warn me to when the turnoff to the backroad into Lihue was. So we went down there, and then down a side road, and were able to fool with things until the windows cleared. The correct answer seemed to be: run the fan at night, not the AC. And the other correct answer seemed to be: read the *@#(@#$ manual to learn Julie's systems better.
But, ugh that was stressful. Not my best first nighttime experience, but it was very good that my dad was there to calmly talk about the problem and to guide us off on a side road and resolve it. Whew.
We'd planned to go into Lihue all the way to the game store, to plot all the whole route, but it was getting late by this point, so we turned around and head homeward.
We turned at Tree Tunnel Road to go into Koloa, and that was a nasty experience too, because it was another high speed road, and road markings were often all but invisible. Bleh. That was the one road I went down that felt really uncomfortable: a car would be oncoming, and I'd largely lose my place on the road (visually).
We eventually got out to the shore where Lappert's Ice Cream is, and Kimberly (who'd joined the trip so that we could go to Lappert's, and later regretted it because of the fog debacle and our journey down the dark back road that she called "Murder Lane", and where she said the man with the hook lived) and I had some ice cream. (They had Love Potion #9 for the first time in years!) Reward!
And then we went back via Koloa Road, which turned out to be not nearly as bad in the dark as the Tree Tunnel Road had been.
And when we got home I had definitely had enough driving for the day. Though at no point was I as painfully tense as on my first several drives.
So, I don't think I'm going to the game shop on Thursday. I don't think I can deal with driving all the way back from Lihue on that highway yet. (Though I'm hoping it'll be a little less crowded at the 8 or 9 o'clock that I expect to come home than at the 7 o'clock we were driving today.)
For that to make sense, I need to do a little nighttime driving here and there, to get used to it better, so that I can feel up to the drive from Lihue in the near future.
And I guess I should really read Julie's manual.
No, everything's OK, but ...
So, when I did my first practice drive in Berkeley in December, I was a little overwhelmed by all the cars, people, bicyclists, and scooterists coming from every which direction. A few different people said, "If you can drive in Berkeley, you can drive anywhere" and I felt good about driving in the quieter, calmer Hawaiian environment.
And there's not the same information overload here, but I really wasn't ready for the two-lane windy up-and-down roads that you travel at 40-50 mph. (Kimberly and I are both continuously amazed at how little we noted the curves, rises, and dips in these roads when we were simple passengers traveling these roads in years past.) I feel like I'm still trying to find my place (and the place of my large car, Julie the Benz) in those lanes, and if I get tired or fatigued I have to fight to maintain that place.
But, day by day and week by week it's getting easier.
Well, the driving is, even on the highway, even on windy, pothole-y Koloa Road.
Sort of.
The parking still feels beyond me because I just don't have a feel on where Julie's right side is: my dad says that generally I seem to think I'm closer on the right than I really am, which I suppose is the right direction to work in from. So today, for example, my dad and I went to the really small, cramped parking lot next to Sheraton Beach, because I'm doing my best not to avoid places just because they intimidate me. And he suggested that he should park the car once he saw the situation there ... and eventually decided he couldn't make it into the parking space we'd spotted, but found an alternative. So he parked there, not I. And then after swimming at the Sheraton, I took Julie out, but I had to do about a 27-point turn to do so. OK, it was maybe 7 or 9 points really, but a bit teeth-gnashing for me. It really, genuinely is a super tight parking lot.
But the driving ...
So I've been wanting to go gaming on Thursday nights, and my dad said he thought we should go out together at night first, and he was so right.
Those fast two-lane roads turn out to be so much worse when there's a stream of cars with headlights coming in the opposite direction. The highway was super stressful, but I think I'll be able to deal with it in the near future. I mean, I had problems when I had a few cars oncoming together, or a few cars at a turn, but the further I went, the better I learned to look away from the headlights. On the way back, I was getting better at watching the shoulder instead of the center line if I needed to. But that's a stressful way to drive at night (at speed) and not at all what I remember from when I was younger.
Every once in a while I'd get 15 or 30 seconds without an oncoming car, and just the dark road lighting up ahead of me, and that was more the quiet solitude and joy I remembered from night driving in the past.
And then there was the fog.
The window fog that is. (We're not in the Bay Area any more.)
Quite a ways up on the highway, my front window started fogging. The AC was running cool, because it has since we've gotten Julie, and so we set to heating things up. But the fog remained. Eventually we realized it was on the outside of the window, a result of the cool window condensing the high humidity outside. The windshield wipers worked a bit, but I was getting overloaded, just like on that first drive, and so I was having troubles figuring out how to get them going.
This was all on the long curve into Lihue, which is one of several places where there's a long stretch of road with no way to pull over, unless you ditch your car in what's probably still a muddy morass where it'll need to be towed. So I was getting a little stress about my window that was getting gradually less transparent.
Fortunately my dad was able to warn me to when the turnoff to the backroad into Lihue was. So we went down there, and then down a side road, and were able to fool with things until the windows cleared. The correct answer seemed to be: run the fan at night, not the AC. And the other correct answer seemed to be: read the *@#(@#$ manual to learn Julie's systems better.
But, ugh that was stressful. Not my best first nighttime experience, but it was very good that my dad was there to calmly talk about the problem and to guide us off on a side road and resolve it. Whew.
We'd planned to go into Lihue all the way to the game store, to plot all the whole route, but it was getting late by this point, so we turned around and head homeward.
We turned at Tree Tunnel Road to go into Koloa, and that was a nasty experience too, because it was another high speed road, and road markings were often all but invisible. Bleh. That was the one road I went down that felt really uncomfortable: a car would be oncoming, and I'd largely lose my place on the road (visually).
We eventually got out to the shore where Lappert's Ice Cream is, and Kimberly (who'd joined the trip so that we could go to Lappert's, and later regretted it because of the fog debacle and our journey down the dark back road that she called "Murder Lane", and where she said the man with the hook lived) and I had some ice cream. (They had Love Potion #9 for the first time in years!) Reward!
And then we went back via Koloa Road, which turned out to be not nearly as bad in the dark as the Tree Tunnel Road had been.
And when we got home I had definitely had enough driving for the day. Though at no point was I as painfully tense as on my first several drives.
So, I don't think I'm going to the game shop on Thursday. I don't think I can deal with driving all the way back from Lihue on that highway yet. (Though I'm hoping it'll be a little less crowded at the 8 or 9 o'clock that I expect to come home than at the 7 o'clock we were driving today.)
For that to make sense, I need to do a little nighttime driving here and there, to get used to it better, so that I can feel up to the drive from Lihue in the near future.
And I guess I should really read Julie's manual.