Route 2: The Highway That Was My Personal Obstacle Course

It’s been a long time since I blogged a travel story. All my Murphy’s Law of Transportation stories so far have been about public transportation, so today I’d like to talk about the

This coming week my sister’s moving out of the apartment in Amherst, Massachusetts where she lived for her college career. I spent a large chunk of the last two years living with our aunt and grandparents in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, so I got to visit her semi-regularly. The trip between the two towns was pretty straightforward, but typically took about an hour and a half, though it could be longer with traffic. Most of that trip was spent driving on Route 2.

How I loathed Route 2.

For some reason, for the first year, one of every two ventures I made out to Amherst featured nerve-wracking moments. On Route 2, where the speed limit is 55mph, but everyone typically seems to drive at 70-75mph.

Random tangent: I’m guessing that traffic slows down when the weather is bad. My trips were always voluntary, so I never made the drive when the weather looked like it might make things difficult. After leaving Route 2, there was another 30+ minutes of driving on windy, hilly roads in the middle of nowhere. The prospect of ice and rain was not a welcoming one on these roads. I have made the trip out of Amherst in bad weather, but not the trip to Amherst. Which is what this post is about.

The stress of these events—3 of which I remember vividly—contributed to my stress at the prospect of making the drive, making my trips out to Amherst less frequent than I had expected them to be.

Incident #1

The first incident happened during maybe my second or third drive to Amherst, when I was still not quite sure of the roads. There was a lot of traffic that day, but going quite fast. I was in the row of cars in the left lane.

(Route 2 is a 2-lane highway for most of this trip, except the last stretch where it became a 1-lane highway. Yes, the left lane is supposed to be for overtaking, but when there are people stubbornly doing the speed limit, the left lane becomes the 70mph travel lane, while the right lane is the 55mph travel lane.)

The car in front of me was a bigger car than mine. (Not unusual. I drove a 2-door VW GTI.)

In front of that car was a big truck. You know, one of those gigantic things.

So that’s the scene: me in my little car, on an unfamiliar highway that goes on forever. I just have time to see something red by the truck’s tires when the car in front of me swerves.

Now, I learned to drive in Germany, where it was strictly drilled into me to never swerve when startled. I was taught to break.

So I don’t swerve. But I can’t break suddenly either, because the car behind me is quite close. I break, but slowly. I just have time to register that it was one of those bright red plastic fuel containers, and then I’ve driven over it. (Between the wheels, at least.) I hear it dragging for a few seconds, then I hear it release. In the rearview mirror, I see the car behind me swerve, but not enough, and catch the container under itself, too.

When I got back to my grandparents’, I took the car to a local mechanic just to check that I hadn’t hurt anything. He was very nice, checking the car and reassuring me that there was no damage at no charge.

Incident #2

This time, I was relatively accustomed to the drive. But the gas container incident hadn’t quite faded from my memory on the day that I was driving down Route 2, again in the left lane, again in traffic.

Around the same place where the gas container incident had happened, again I encountered an obstacle! This time, it was a white plastic trash bin, lying across the left half of the lane.

Luckily, everyone was swerving around it so it was visible a good few seconds beforehand, rather than coming out of nowhere. The cars in the right lane were spaced far enough apart that this was not too difficult.

Incident #3

By this point, the it had become a bit on an inside joke among my friends that Route 2 was my personal obstacle course.

I was also growing more confident in my driving. After all, if I’d managed not to get into an accident so far, I was doing pretty well. So my guard was perhaps a little bit lowered one sunny day.

I drove without incident past the areas where I’d formerly encountered obstacles. Traffic was sparser than usual, but both lanes were moving fast: probably 65-70mph.

I was more than half way through my course on Route 2 when I rounded a corner and saw, just a split second before I had to react…

A couch.

Sitting there blocking off 2/3 of the left side of the right lane was a couch. Not lying sideways or anything, no. It was upright, looking perfectly comfy and innocent.

Fortunately, being in the left lane (as usual), I only had to veer to the leftmost side of my lane to avoid the couch.

People in the right lane were swerving into the shoulder, and I’ve never been so relieved to see that there was a shoulder to the highway. (Sections of this highway don’t have a shoulder; had this happened in any of those places, this would have undoubtably resulted in a massive pile-up.)

In summary: driving is dangerous, but I’ve somehow been extremely lucky.