Driving used to be fun. When I was a teenager, and life bore down on me for one reason or another, I would climb into my Dad’s car and drive to Texas and back. Those were the days - the highway stretched straight ahead the whole way, and there was never a trooper on the road, so if you felt the need for speed, you could fulfill it. Texas was about 90 miles away from our home in Lawton, Oklahoma, but that 90 miles spelled freedom. Freedom from cares, freedom from responsibilities, freedom to let the wind blow through my hair. All that freedom for just 60 cents a gallon.

Today, driving is another experience altogether. Any driving experience these days can be defined by one or more of these things: congested traffic, road construction, ludicrously high gas prices, angry drivers, idiot drivers and/or bad drivers.

Angry drivers I can live with. You can usually tell who they are; angry drivers are the guys bobbing and weaving through traffic, going unusually fast for no good reason. They’re the guys or gals who ride your ass when you drive, shooting you the bird with a sneer as you nervously watch them in your rear view mirror. I deal with these guys by annoying them. By driving really slowly and riding my brakes, I can usually get these guys to pass me and endanger someone else’s life. Every now and then, one of them will retaliate by driving slowly in front of me, but if that happens, I just let them until their need for speed drives them to take off, rubber screeching and tail weaving.

Bad drivers are a little more difficult to deal with. These are the completely unpredictable drivers. Their speeds can vary from 40 to 80 on the highway, and it seems most of them don’t know the meaning of the white line the marks the border of each lane. I deal with these people by giving them the widest berth possible. It may mean going really fast or really slow, but the name of the game here is getting the heck away from these guys.

The hardest of all are the idiot drivers. These are the clueless morons texting while driving, or the people who come to a complete stop to turn off a highway, or those who stop while merging onto a highway. These are the folks who tell their insurance claims adjuster that they don’t think they had an accident when, in reality, they’d scraped the entire length of a Hummer. (”I thought I had just run over the curb. Oh, my!”) These are the folks who are completely unaware of their surroundings, holding everyone on the highway hostage as they take up the only available lane going 48 in a 65mph zone. These are the people I’d like to line up against the wall while I run down the line slapping each one hard as I passed.

With the road ragers, the idiots and the just-plain-bad drivers everywhere, it’s just no fun to blow off steam by taking a road trip anymore. It’s dangerous, it’s frustrating and, if you stop to think that you’re now paying about $1.50 for every mile you drive, it’s really not worth it.

I think it’s sad, though. Driving used to mean something. When we were kids, we traveled the famous Route 66 before it was famous. Cars were behemoths with so much heavy gauge steel that you didn’t have to worry too much about being in a wreck. Now, you’re lucky if your car can’t be dented with a little force behind your thumb.

Someday, I hope the road can become my friend again. I miss those drives down a quiet highway.

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