On Saturday night, I was in West Chester for a graduation party. Much to my delight and relief, I arrived without trouble. However, the ride home was a different story. As is my custom, I wound up rather lost in an unfamiliar area.
Around 11 PM I left West Chester with Amy and Joe. As you know, I absolutely despise driving on highways. Driving on highways in the dark is worse. Driving on highways in the dark on a route I've never taken is even worse. Driving on highways in the dark on a route I've never taken while wearing my glasses rather than my contacts is nearly the worst possible driving scenario I could imagine. Fortunately, I had two friends with me, and it turned out that Amy is excellent at getting un-lost and keeping me from freaking out. Joe didn't do me much good, but at least he didn't make anything worse. Before I even hit a main road, I had to pull over to calm myself down. I convinced myself that although my glasses didn't give me perfect vision, they were plenty good enough to allow to drive safely. I also called my dad to ask whether or not the headlights ever got fixed. They hadn't, which meant that my brights are the equivalent of any other car's normal headlights. I was afraid that I'd have to drive without my brights, and without them I can only see about ten feet in front of the car - and that's not an exaggeration. Amy helped with the calming down. After a few minutes and a switch of CDs (it was decided that Rimsky-Korsakov is much more calming than Apocalyptica), we were ready to go.
Merging onto 75 made me nervous, as usual, but as usual nothing bad happened. There was no cataclysmic ten-car pile-up. I'm getting more and more used to merging. The only real problem on the highway came when I couldn't find the white dashed line between my lane and the one next to me. I was not okay with that. After a moment of investigation, Amy discovered that I was still in a real lane. The dashed line had just been covered by road sealant stuff.
We were nearly home when I made a horrible mistake. I wasn't sure which exit to get off at, so when I saw the sign for the Lockland-Reading exit, I chose it. I've driven around in Reading plenty of times and Lockland a couple, so I was confident that I'd be able to find my way home. I was familiar with the intersection I found myself at, but I didn't remember exactly how to get home. I tried a couple possibilities, but I didn't seem to get closer to anywhere familiar enough that I could easily get home. We got into shadier and shadier parts of Lockland. Eventually it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to lock the car doors. When I talked to Kirby the next day, she informed that one of the streets I had spent a lot of time on was one that George had told her to never ever drive on at night under any circumstances. I thought about calling George since he lives in Lockland, but I decided against it. I'm not sure why. It would have been much wiser to call George. I suppose that my reluctance to ask for directions is part of what makes me Man-ria. I found my way back to the intersection we started at and pulled over to get out my GPS. It hadn't even occurred to me to use it until that point. We plugged it into the car and everything, but we couldn't get it to turn on. Amy and I both tried everything we could think of, but to no avail. We even looked for the instruction manual, but couldn't find it.
At Amy's insistence, we abandoned hope of finding our way through Lockland and got back on 75-south. The next exit we saw was for 562 - the Norwood Lateral. Amy and I thought that would get us back to Ronald Reagan. We were wrong. Our first mistake was that we got on going the wrong direction. We took the first exit we found to switch directions. The place where we got off was even shadier than any place we had encountered in Lockland. We spent about 100 yards on that road before getting back on 562 in the opposite direction which took us onto 75-north. Amy called her dad and was asking for him to Map-Quest the way home when I saw a sign for Ronald Reagan. The transition from 75 to Ronald Reagan to Galbraith was uneventful.
Instead of turning left on Galbraith like normal, Amy recommended that we take a short-cut to her house. So we turned right and took Congress Run. Up to this point, the inside of my windshield had gradually begun to fog up, and none of the usual methods were working to clear it off. I even tried wiping it with a towel, but that didn't help either. So I was stuck driving up Congress Run at night with a fogged-up windshield and without real brights. Congress Run is an insane street. Driving on it is an adventure - an adventure best reserved for sunny days. It's incredibly steep and narrow with hairpin turns screened by thick vegetation. It provided an entirely different sort of adventure than Lockland, although it was still an unpleasant adventure. After taking at least three times as long as it would normally take to drive down that street, we arrived at Compton and made it to her house without trouble. I dropped her off, drove Joe home, and returned to my home around 12:30 AM. What should have been a 20-30 minute drive turned into what may have been the scariest hour and a half of my life. I am now more determined than ever to learn how to get from place to place on the highways.
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