Camping over yonder...

Well I'm a little bit dissapointed with the font selection for the blogs...I just used all of them and I'm not satisfied with any of the choices. I think I'll pick courier because I used to watch Jim Courier play tennis when I was young...

The magnum was packed to the hilt. Pam had decided it would be best to carpool, and so we had two friend, Tim and Cathy, in the backseat joining us. They had a lot of stuff...I tried to shake off flashbacks of driving the U-Haul 600 miles down here 6 months ago while we headed down the street to the highway.

Slowly, and when I say slowly I mean, SLOWLY, we entered the mass of people heading towards Tracy on East 580. The time was 4:11. I began to wonder if all these people commute all the way into the city every single day. What a depressing thought, to have to sit in traffic and waste away precious hours out of the day. Hours that you could be spending with your wife, kids, dog, hampster, or just plain by yourself in a happy place, rather than in a car on a hot freeway. If only we had communicated better, I thought, we might have been able to get on this road 30 minutes ago and avoided some of the rush.

I manually shifted through the gears to ease the use of my brakes. The magnum almost felt a bit sluggish being settled with camping gear and 4 people but as a tradeoff it looked a little more sleek. The weight had dropped it about 7/16ths of an inch. I had hoped it would have dropped more so that I could see what some new sport springs would do to the stance but I hadn't been so lucky.

One by one we began to see cars on the side of the road. Some just seeming to be sitting there, broken down. Others had a few marks from accidents. Some people looked like they had just stopped on the side of the road because they were tired and wanted to switch drivers. Let me get one thing straight...if you're driving in California and your car is powering down the street on its own, you SHALL NOT at any time stop your car on any freeway, even if you are way over on the shoulder. People are stupid and no matter what, they will slow down, look, rubber neck, look back and slam on their brakes because they weren't paying attention. The ripple effect spreads back from that point and suddenly you've got thousands of people who just want to get out of town for a simple camping trip but are now STUCK in YOUR traffic!