NASCAR driving

Careless and reckless behaviors seem to crop up in the widowed population. Hmmm...this might help explain my flirtation with speeding on the highway - one friend refers to it as NASCAR driving. Sure as a teenager I drove fast a couple of times to see what it was like, but in the past year when I'm on a long open stretch of highway I can get a real lead foot. There's a bridge near Tampa which has one particularly long straight stretch where you can see traffic for quite a distance and there's no place for someone with radar to hide. This is where I first made a mental note that "hey, I’m going kind of fast here."

The habit came out again a couple of weeks ago when driving from Alabama to South Carolina. The undulating hills provided a perfect setting of long downhill sections (with no hiding place for radar) and then long uphill sections on which to coast and slow down - I was careful to slow down before going over the hillcrests. After two hours of rollercoaster roads I came over the top of a hill and zipped right passed two patrol cars in the median. The cars were positioned so the two drivers could talk to one another. Slowing down over the crests had spared me from a huge bill… I was only a little over the limit, but I swear one of the cars tooted his horn as if to say - hey, watch yourself there buddy.