Cars

The dreaded car. The beloved car.
What to do about all the cars in this world?
Got a rude wake-up call -- as in, this is Italy, remember, you idiot? -- yesterday picking my husband up from the airport where the cheap flights land.
A trip that should have taken 45 minutes on fast road from my side of the hill took more than two and a half hours. Got stuck in the most horrendous, most Italian of traffic jams -- an almost complete standstill for miles on the Raccordo Anulare, the beltway around Rome.
Now, anybody who lives here -- or who has lived here, as I have, and who remembers stuff -- knows that the Raccordo can be bad at any time -- although 11:30 a.m. is not usually the time. But the rule about Italy is that at any time, at any place, the most day-ruining traffic can just happen to you. You cannot plan for it. You cannot do anything about it. And you never know when it's just around the bend.
I was zooming along happily towards the airport, making great time, enjoying driving my old clunker like I have been, when I got onto the Raccordo, where I needed to be for about 10 miles to reach the airport. Zipped along on it for a couple of miles -- maybe driving a little fast, but kinda, sorta trying not to -- when all of a sudden, stop.
Okay. That can happen at an exit or something.
But then just stay stopped -- maybe go a mile an hour -- for the next hour.
Italians just irritate the hell out of me when this happens. I see people inching over to the right-hand lane, getting off at the gas station, only to come out the other end of the gas station, just to get a few hundred feet ahead. Making things worse.
My mood is deteriorating. My husband's flight has long landed.
Finally, I hear a warning on the radio, telling motorists to avoid the Raccordo, right where I was. A huge pile-up overnight (Italy has the most hair-rising pile-ups involving dozens of cars) has meant traffic is down to one lane from four and the line is backed up "several kilometers."
I make friends with the guy driving the truck beside me. (Plenty of time to talk). I told him what I just heard on the radio, that the pile-up had happened at the "centrale del latte" exit. At the milk plant. Not a clue where that was.
"That's just up here, not that far," he said, relieved. "That's not bad." We stop and start next to each other for the next half-hour.
Finally, he called over to me. "I can see it," he said, benefiting from his high vantage point over the stalled traffic. "It's just under that bridge. Maybe 500 meters away." I gave him a hopeful thumbs-up.
Maybe twenty minutes later, we both get through. And then, with no guilt whatsoever, I drive fast. Until a guy cuts me off in the most ridiculous, dangerous way and I think, better slow down before I have an accident too.
The first thing my husband tells me when we get into the car to drive home (did I just call it home?) is that our older son in Washington called him just before 6:00 a.m. London time, as he was wending his way to the cheap London airport on the other side of town (cheap European flights are actually not that cheap when you add everything up, like getting to the airports involved).
He said he could tell immediately something was wrong before my son spoke. The time of the call was an immediate tip-off -- 1 a.m. in the States.
My son was in an unknown area near Baltimore, in his car, driving to Baltimore airport to pick up the Maryland friend (we lived in Virginia) he's staying with there, who was coming in on a late flight.
A carful of drunken Latinos had crashed into him at a red light and then sped off, he explained. Quite a jolt to the back of the car, he said, pushing his car into the middle of the intersection.
After they drove off, he drove off after them -- and caught them.
He asked them why they hadn't stopped. They laughed and talked among themselves in Spanish. He could see they had been drinking. A guy in the back seat then yelled out, okay, yeah, let's stop, where shall we stop then?
My son decided right then he didn't need to stop anywhere with this carload of hit-and-runners after all. He sped off, shaken.
And then called his dad in London.
Today, his neck hurts from the crash.