I've returned from a quick trip to Florida to pick up my father's cats. Not a terribly exciting trip as these things go, although I suppose that's a good thing. Good weather, both ways, so that was a plus. But a one-way distance of 860 miles, with all but the first 2 miles and the last 3 on Interstate highways (or their equivalent) through a relatively flat landscape with no view of mountains or ocean makes for a pretty boring drive. South Carolina is especially interminable, and it's less than 200 miles of the trek.
The cats were very well behaved on the return trip: Sami complained for five minutes every half-hour, and O. Henry complained for the first twenty minutes of each day and not at all thereafter. And they have taken to their new home as though they'd lived here for years. The as-of-yet-not-officially-named gray cat was happy to see me return, bag of cat food in hand. That didn't stop her from giving me a lengthy piece of her mind waiting for the cat food to hit her bowl.
One of the highlights of the trip was seeing a school-bus-yellow Hummer. (Well, a Hummer H2, like the one above, which I guess is the SUV version of the Machomobile for idiots.) Very bizarre, indeed: why would you buy the vehicle in the pretense that it makes you as rugged as the Marlboro Man, and then paint it to look like a school bus? I suppose it allows you to sneak unseen through the school bus yard on the way to your secret manly spy mission.
The best part of the trip, though, was a 20-minute piece of highway theater in Florida. I'm cruising along at 2 mph over the speed limit in the middle of the three lanes going in my direction, and am passed by someone going perhaps 10 mph over the limit. Then I'm passed by someone else doing 10 miles over the limit - and it becomes pretty clear that this second car is an unmarked police car. (No markings, no lights on top - but a big star on the license plate and a uniformed driver kind of give it away.) The first driver tumbles to the secret and slows to my speed, as does the cop car, now 5 or 6 car lengths ahead of me and no more than 2 lengths behind the first driver. Someone else goes around me pretty quickly, and slams on his brakes when he recognizes the license plate as being the police. I drift over into the righthand lane, the better to watch the vehicular interaction. The first car slides into the middle lane; the cop immediately slides over right behind him.
Cars keep getting added to our little Kabuki group. Someone zooms up in the middle lane and starts to go around - and slows abruptly when he's close enough to see the star on the license plate. Forty-five seconds later, someone else zooms up behind him and starts to go around, only to stop when the immediately previous car slides into the right lane ahead of me, revealing the cop car.
A couple more cars join our pack, always doing the same: overtaking the back car and weaving their way through all the cars going the same speed, until they spot the cop car and slow themselves down. And the whole time, the cop car is no more than 2 car lengths behind the first speeding car.
After about 20 minutes of cruising along like this, now with 12 or 15 cars in our convoy because no one wants to speed past the police car, and with all traffic ahead of our group having gone out of sight long ago, the policeman finally decides to stop messing with the head of the driver in front of him, and pulls into the right lane and accelerates away from us.
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