Driving To Sin City At The Speed Of Fright
By Kevin Wilkerson, PubClub.com Travel Blogger
Whenever someone volunteers to drive on a road trip – especially on the boring and featureless I-15 from Los Angeles to Vegas – I jump at the offer.
What I fail to take into consideration is that person’s driving style. This I was reminded of when a friend – let’s call her Christine – shot out of Hermosa Beach as if propelled like a Top Fuel dragster and blasted onto the 105 freeway at warp speed.
I don’t mean to say we were going fast but I looked like the guy in that old Bose speakers commercial. At this rate, I texted a friend who was meeting us in Vegas that we would make the 4 1/2-hour trip in about 30 minutes.
“Does my driving bother you,?” Christine shouted above the roar of the engine while simultaneously dodging slower cars and glancing down occasionally at her phone to change the Pandora station. “It does scare some of my friends.”
“Well you certainly have my attention,” I responded through chattering teeth.
Frankly I was amazed. I did not know it was possible to go that fast on an LA. Freeway.
I did mention to her that race car drivers don’t worry so much about speed to go fast but prefer to have consistent lap times because being smooth gets them to the finish line faster than speeding up and slowing down.
“Oh, I agree,” Christine said. “That’s why I try and avoid using the brakes.”
Great!
With this additional piece of information, I decided to adopt a passenger strategy of closing my eyes and hoping for the best. Otherwise, I would have been sitting on the very edge of the seat with my fingernails dug into the dashboard that would have taken hours to remove.
It seemed to work as I calmed down considerably, tho I did take occasional glimpses at the road through one eye.
Miraculously, we arrived in Vegas without hitting anything.
And, just as surprisingly, without breaking the sound barrier.
Traffic, road construction and a half hour stop at the ridiculously busy In-And-Out in Barstow saw to that, and our travel time was only slightly more had we flown on Southwest.
Still, it was a trip at the speed of fright.
Cheers!
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