Driving in Virginia is generally a pleasure. Lots of trees, meadows, vineyards, hills, streams, beautiful homes — and outside of the cities, almost no traffic. Every trip, short or long, is kind of a delight. I sure couldn’t say that about Southern California.
That being said, Virginia drivers are… different. The single strangest example was something that I would never have seen in a million years in SoCal. It was the most un-Californian behavior I could imagine.
We were driving to Charlottesville on I-64 (divided highway with 2 lanes in each direction), and crews were working along the median, removing tree branches and foliage damaged by winter storms. Traffic was pretty light. A light-up sign said the left lane would be closed up ahead, but the closure was nowhere in sight, apparently miles up the road. Everyone filtered over into the right lane anyway, leaving the left lane completely empty. After a while, traffic started to slow and bunch up, even though the closure was way out of sight.
The left lane was wide open as far as the eye could see, but not a single person thought “well, heck, I’ll pass these two miles of cars and then get over”. We stayed, voluntarily, in a single lane for four miles or so, and not a single line-jumper came up in the left lane. In Southern California, both lanes would have been filled to capacity all the way up to the merge point, where they would only merge when forced to do so. Heck, if a SoCal driver thought he could save two car lengths by merging late, there’d be a mad scramble into the left lane.
We still had our California plates, and I briefly considered blasting up the left lane to reinforce some stereotypes and endear ourselves to the natives, but then I realized if everyone was being this cooperative, they’d probably never find our car and our bodies.
