Not long after I started my current job I was driving a literally Fire Engine Red Landrover Defender 110 plastered in high-vis and strobes.
A guy on a motorbike sitting in a side road looked at me, made eye contact, looked away, and then pulled out in front of me when I was about two car lengths away doing 60mph, and wobbled off up the road at about 40mph.
There was a great howling of tyres and sliding of things to the front, and some fine Gaelic words that I do not care to write down or translate.
One time I was casually driving near Frankfurt with 150kmh (there's enough room on the A5) while a Lamborghini slowly caught up with me on the left lane. After a couple of seconds, the driver thought it was too boring and decided to accelerate. In the blink of an eye, he was so far away, you could barely even see it. The pebble it threw into my newly changed windscreen is a story for another thread...
I used this technique to cross the street in Vietnam, oncoming motorcycles look where they’re going, and they trust that you will too. Looking at an oncoming motorcycle just results in both of you coming to a stop. Guess the ski instructors were right: you go where you look.
I still drive like I rode my motorcycle: looking at every car on the road and trying to figure out how they could kill me, and then responding accordingly.
When I first had my license, I ran up the back of someone. After checking that the car wasn't too badly damaged and exchanging details I decided to drive the car the rest of the way home.
Was cruising along the freeway, when the bonnet (hood) flipped up. Thankfully, I could see through the gap, and managed to pull the car over safely.
A younger, stupider me was riding a motorcycle on highway 99 near Merced. It was just after dawn on a Saturday, with literally no one else on the road for miles.
So as an experiment, at 70 mph I put my face down on the gas tank: I could see the highway lines on either side, but literally nothing ahead. I wanted to see how long I could hold that position without freaking out. Answer: about twenty seconds.
This is far from the only experiment I did back then, I’m lucky to be alive.
I was definitely concentrating, and also in a semi-permanent state of yelling in terror. I don't understand why cars don't just fall off the sides of some of those roads and down into the steep ravines that appear to be the UK's (or at least Scotland's) answer to a shoulder.
Ha, I remember knocking on the rear windscreen of a car as it passed me by, I was doing about 20mph, the car not much faster, I didn't even need to stretch my arm to do so.
The driver pull over further down the street and I had a conversion with him very calmly, he wasn't happy about me knocking on the window and told me that if he was younger he'd punch my lights out.
A formative experience when I was learning to drive was being pulled over to the right and watching a firetruck pull behind a car stopped at a red light, siren blaring and lights flashing, and eventually having to get on the PA and tell the person to run the red light so they could get through.
Haha, I drove around Texas in some small Kia (I just got the cheapest rental), I was constantly afraid someone would not see me (as many cars were much higher) and drive over me and my tiny car (thinking, "the road is really getting worse by the day!" ;) ).
It was pretty scary. I would slow down when people or animals were in the path of the car, but my driving instructor didn't like that. He insisted that I should go full speed ahead and trust that anyone in my path would get out of the way.
A guy on a motorbike sitting in a side road looked at me, made eye contact, looked away, and then pulled out in front of me when I was about two car lengths away doing 60mph, and wobbled off up the road at about 40mph.
There was a great howling of tyres and sliding of things to the front, and some fine Gaelic words that I do not care to write down or translate.
Seeing without seeing.
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