Suicide Drive

As I sit in a hotel room, waiting for four young children to depart to the land of nod (or sleepy bo-bos) and Caroline parties with her ringette team, I find myself with that wonderful confluence of events ... some time to write, and something to write about. Even though it’s small, I decided that I should capture it.

I was driving with the kids today, having finally managed to get them into the car as we attempted to get to Caroline’s ringette game somewhere near the front end of the game (she had wisely gone on ahead with team-mates) and given I didn’t really know exactly where I was going, i wasn’t perhaps paying quite the attention to the road that i might normally.

I pulled up at an intersection and looked at the arrow on the sign above me that clearly indicated that I was in a lane that could only make a left hand turn. No problem there, left was the direction that I wanted to go in. So I reached into those somewhat dormant recesses of my mind that relate back to the study I did to get my Canadian license and thought, “one way road onto one way road, you can make a left hand turn against the red light, just as you normally can for a right hand turn.

Now because I was on a one way road, I was against the left hand curb of the road, rather than the island as I would have been had I been on a divided road. Which meant of course that because I was turning onto another one way road, I hugged the curb just as if I was turning left at anytime with care back home.

I made the turn and casually started accelerating. There was no traffic so I was nice and relaxed. That relaxed feeling wasn’t a long-term friend though, it had no intention of hanging around. It really started to flee at about the point in time when I realised that there was a small red sedan travelling in the lane next to me on my right. Of course, that in itself wasn’t so bad. It was the fact that it was travelling toward me that gave me pause. That and the really strange look that I could see on the other driver’s face as he looked at me.

Because of course, in Canada, when someone is driving towards you on the road, they are supposed to go past you on your left, not your right! And when I think about it from his perspective, he was actually driving on a divided road. A road that consisted of 6 lanes, three either side of a substantial traffic island. And given he was in the middle lane of his three, there was no way in hell that there should have been another vehicle heading toward him on his right!

Fortunately there was a hotel on the corner and so i quickly aborted my suicide drive and decided to pull into their carpark, traverse it, pull back onto the road that I turned left from and try again. This time I managed to wait for the lights and make my left hand turn to the far side of the intersection.

On the bright side, the kids didn’t even notice that something was wrong!