Saturday morning, I took a drive down to the Florida Keys to drop off some supplies and to check on my crew doing renovations to some time-share units. My trip was delayed because 100+ Ford Mustangs out of Fort Lauderdale were doing a 9 1 1 tribute rally complete with police escort. They ended up at a motel resort on mile marker 84. I had to continue to marker 60 and luckily, I got around the police holding back regular traffic and slipped between some of these Mustangs and 'rode their convoy' for more than 50 miles while most of the other cars were forced to wait for the convoy to completely pass...
After that, things became rather usual. Traffic got back to normal. I stayed at the project measured the next round of units to go into production and shortly before sundown, I decided to head back to Miami.
If you don't already know, the road through the Florida Keys is US-1, often referred to as 'useless-one' a 2 lane narrow highway for much of the trip. There are newly paved sections that allowing passing lanes, widened lanes, shoulders, center barricades and a few areas with 4 lanes, painted safety divides and turn lanes. That said... the older sections nearing the top of the Keys seem to be the last to undergo widening. It's still 45 miles per hour 2 lane non-passing zones and plenty of signs indicating this.
I want to preface that I take driving seriously. There are too many bad drivers on the roadways and Saturday they were out in 'full force'
Night had fallen and I was nearing the halfway point of my return trip... that puts me on the older 2 lane road going 45 miles per hour. Since traffic was moving smoothly, I could have turned on cruise-control.
It seemed no one was in a big rush and the few cars wanting to pass others waited for the 'passing zone' to get around trucks and slower vehicles. Everything seemed 'pretty cool' until some bright blue lights appeared from far behind. Maybe you have noticed this is your city... it's illegal here. According to the police, standard equipment blue headlamps on certain luxury cars are legal but the 'aftermarket' high intensity blue halogen are not. There are a few cars on the road with some of these ultra bright BLUE headlights... typically, I see them on 'pimpish' Cadillac Escalades. There must be some connection to buying that model car and blue lights... maybe Escalade owners have bad eyesight. I really don't know other than they all seem to need these ultrabright blue headlights. Sometimes 2 aren't enough... they need fog lamps too!
That was the case with the driver behind me on Saturday night... we're all doing the speed limit and I was a safe distance from the car ahead of me. But, the driver of the car with blue headlights was gaining on us. It wasn't long before this driver was directly behind me... tailgating me to be exact. His headlights were illuminating all of my car interior with their bluish glow like some alien spacecraft was getting ready to teleport my car into the mothership. It was fu*king annoying to say the least. These lights reflected in my windshield to a point where they impaired my vision to the car in front of me. This persisted for more than 5 miles. When I had a chance to speed up, this guy was right there with me. I couldn't get him to backoff...
OK, I had enough... so I took my foot off the gas and allowed my car to slow to a crawl... I did it at a point where I didn't see any oncoming traffic. Although we were in a no passing zone, he could have easily passed me... yet this guy with the blinding blue lights refused to go around. We were going less than 20 miles per hour and he refused to pass. He wasn't more than a car length behind me, this I could tell because his beams weren't directly blinding.
FINALLY... Finally he passed me and so did 10 other cars who were behind him! Although they must have thought I was the idiot... they hadn't seen things from my perspective.
I say it was on purpose. He couldn't have been so ignorant not to know his headlights were blinding me.
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