You guys, I ended up driving a total of 28 hours last week and am still lying in my bed recuperating.

As we all know by now, I very famously added to my drive home from my kids’ college down in Virginia last weekend by driving in the wrong direction for about an hour along scenic I-81 with my third child and not-very-good-copilot. That little detour added about two hours to the already eight-hour drive and brought the grand total of driving last weekend to 18 hours. Zoinks.

My trusty sidekick and I got back into our car early Thursday morning to drive north, this time to visit a few colleges in Upstate New York. Now, I’m the kind of driver who just plugs the endpoint address into my iPhone and follows along as I drive. I don’t study the route and have no idea which way Siri is taking me until she starts barking orders during the drive.

So when she announced that in 23.7 miles we would be exiting left for I-81 north, my daughter and I started to scream.

“WHAT??” I yelled. “Is that a joke?”

And apparently, since I don’t really think Siri has any sense of humor — much less irony — it was not a joke and we ended up on 81 a bit further north than where we generally get off to go home from Virginia. However, I am happy to report, I kept my north and south in check and we made it to our most northerly destination in a little under five hours.

By the time we pulled back into our driveway around 8:30 Friday night, after more than five hours of driving that day, we were both thoroughly over road trips and Siri. I actually started screaming at her at one point late into Friday’s drive when she had me exit a major interstate to cut south on a two-lane highway with traffic lights. I don’t know what Siri is thinking about some times. Ask my daughter, I was yelling like a crazy person.

All that driving kind of cut into my blogging last week, but I did have a little free time to write about our journeys along I-81 and my observations of fellow drivers. Here, try some and for the love of pete, keep right except to pass:

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The Day I Went South

The following is based on actual events. 

This. Totally. Fucking. Happened. 

Let me begin by issuing a disclaimer: I have never purported here to be particularly smart. And while I often seem to by trying to prove quite the opposite in the stories I share on my blog, hopefully I come off – at the very least – as someone who knows her left from her right. Her up from her down. Her north from her south.

Until now. (READ MORE … )

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5 Most Annoying Types of Drivers

I might have mentioned yesterday that I spent the weekend doing a fair amount of driving. Eighteen hours of driving, in fact, and mostly along major interstates that slice through Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and meander across Pennsylvania farmland. And over the course of those hundreds of miles of roadway, I came to a very big conclusion: Other drivers are assholes. (READ MORE … )