Before coming to California I was pretty nervous about driving in/around LA. As I was driving through California with my dad at the beginning of last month I got so excited when we hit a more congested part of the freeway. I was like 'yes!! I can totally do this whole LA driving thing, it's not too bad!'... what I soon learned was that I was out near Riverside- still quite a ways away from LA. As we got closer and closer more cars (and lanes and freeways and exits) started to appear. I was still pretty impressed with my driving for it being my first time in that environment, but I knew I still had a lot to experience.
First off, can I just tell you about how grateful I am for GPS on my phone... I would never be able to survive without it. I have no idea how people navigated around SoCal before GPS (especially if you weren't born and raised here). There are a trillion freeways and they are constantly joining and separating from each other. Oh, & they're referred to as freeways, not highways, interstates, expressways, tollways (thank god there's no tolls). To name a few freeways there's the 405, the 5, the 605, the 105, the 101, the 10, the 110, the 710 and about 358 other ones (always, always, always put 'the' in front of the #). Then there's the streets that no matter whether you go North, South, East, or West they somehow run through every single city in the area- Sepulveda, Figueroa, Crenshaw, Artesia, Western, Rosecrans, Imperial, Slauson. Okay these all most run either East/West or North/South, but I still haven't figured it all out.
I know the Chicagoland area also has many highways but I rarely had to take any and when I did it was either 55 or 88 and 9 times out of 10 when I traveled into the city I took the train, so living amidst them all is making for quite the driving experience. One thing I can definitely appreciate is that LA calls its freeways by their # and not by multiple names- I could never keep The Dan Ryan, The Kennedy, and The Edens Expressways straight.
So anyway, I was beginning to feel pretty confident in my driving abilities. Last weekend I drove into LA to see my little cousin from Seattle perform in a gymnastics meet at the LA Convention Center. Traffic was super light- I was driving in at 7am on a Saturday... and luckily enough my exit dropped me off smack dab in front of the Convention Center. When I was heading home around 1:30pm I plugged in my destination on my phone and was feeling super good about life. You know that overwhelming feeling of happiness when you feel like you've got your life under control? That's how I was feeling. I was sitting at a red light with the freeway entrance ramp off to the left just past the intersection. I was in the lane I was supposed to be, had my J.Cole CD playing and was thinking to myself 'I can do this! I am truly getting a hang of LA driving, and I'm not too shabby at it either!' (I kid you not, this is literally what I was thinking as I sat at that red light) Then the light turned green... and for some reason the car in the lane next to me was in no hurry to start moving forward but I was like alright whatever, I'm going. When I was about halfway through the intersection I caught sight of the undercover cop car coming up the adjacent street with its lights flashing... Oops. Thank god he was going super slow so I was able to get through the intersection without creating too big of a commotion. I honestly have no idea how the other cars knew he was coming... the streetlight didn't have that special flashing light like they do back home & my music wasn't even loud because I was too busy concentrating on the directions. Anyway, thankfully wherever the police officer was going was much more important then the fact that I went through the intersection. So then, I take the ramp onto the freeway and i'm in the FasTrak lane! (Friends from the Midwest- the FasTrak lane is a lane you can pay to use- you have a console on your windshield much like the iPass and you can pay to use this special lane to get from one place to the next faster) I couldn't merge into the regular traffic lanes because I would have had to cross double solid lines and all the cars coming up behind me wanted to go fast... so there I am in the FasTrak without a FasTrak console... Oops. Then all the sudden the FasTrak lanes split completely from the rest of the lanes and we are on our own two-lane freeway!...Eek. A minute or two later we meet back up with the rest of the lanes of traffic and fiiiinally the white lines are now broken & I can merge with all the cars taking the SlowTrak...lol.
So, to summarize: My confidence went from 100 to 0 real quick.
Thankfully, I made it home in one piece, no tickets... yet (anyone know what happens when you use the FasTrak on accident?).
When these types of things happen I just hope that people see my Illinois license plate and forgive me because after all, i'm probably only used to driving down dirt roads alongside cornfields, right?? ;)
All in all, I've learned a few things:
1. When you need to merge, sometimes you just gotta close your eyes and do it (jk, don't close your eyes)
2. There's a direct correlation between expensive cars and asshole drivers
3. I'll forever envy the motorcyclists that get to move more than 10 mph at any given time
4. PCH provides you with some fantastic views
& 5. People like to give you an estimate on how long it takes to get from Point A to Point B "without traffic" (it baffles me that they even know how long it takes without traffic because there's always traffic..??)
xxoo,
Kaila
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