My Newly-Built Driving Tendencies

I had chronicled some of my experiences of how I started driving in India here. I started driving in July 2012, and had been driving in India for about a year. My wife and I traveled to the US in July 2013. The best part about this trip was that I got to drive in the US again. It was a heavenly experience. The first thing I did when we landed in the Dulles airport in Washington DC was rent a car. I had to consciously remind myself to drive on the right side of the road, and to gauge the distance between one car and another. The angel that she is, my wife helped me with this effort, and after my first trip across the beltway, I was raring to drive.

After spending a few days in the DC area, we started upon a road trip to Ithaca to visit my brother, who was studying at Cornell University. Allow me to digress, dear reader, and share with you some of the sights we saw along the way. First, we were passing via Gettysburg PA, which is best known for Lincoln’s speech. In my several trips from Maryland to Ithaca when I was living in the US, I had traveled via Gettysburg and had seen the signs for a museum, but didn’t care enough to stop and see the museum. This time around, we did decide to stop and see the museum – a wonderful experience. The one takeaway that struck me profoundly from this museum visit was a quote by general Robert E. Lee:

Duty is the sublimest word in the language; you can never do more than your duty; you shall never wish to do less.

We proceeded to our trip to Ithaca, and spent a few pleasant days there. On one morning – we were driving in the narrow roads of Ithaca. There was one lane in each direction. In front of us was a car, that seemed to be stopped for no good reason. Now, with my newly-built Indian driving muscles -I subconsciously tried to pass this car, only to find ourselves side-by-side with her, unable to go forward because there was a huge truck up front. The lady driving the car was furious that I had tried passing her – I could see this in her expression. Though I couldn’t hear her, she seemed to be mouthing “Do you think I have stopped on the road for no reason? Why can’t you wait patiently?” There was a good few minutes that we had to wait – and each second of waiting was pregnant with tension thanks to the fury of the lady whom I had unwittingly offended. When the truck finally moved, our awkward encounter ceased, and we breathed a sigh of relief. 

Note: I wrote most of this article, only to find that my wife had chronicled this incident as a part of her write challenge article. I saw that there were slight differences between her recollection and mine. Since the flavor of my article was different, I decided to post this anyway, but I love her article much more than mine.

Image Credit: Aditya Rathod on Unsplash