Driving Miss Shae

Most people know I don't love driving. It's okay, I'm not like my mother who panics in traffic and plans a route that takes her fifteen miles out of the way but which keeps her from ever having to make a left hand turn. My brother loves to drive, he claims it relaxes him. I never understood the facination with driving, for me it's just a way to get from point A to point B withoug having to move my lazy butt much.

So coming to New Mexico with a forty-five minute commute down a mountain every day seems like something I'd hate. But, surprisingly, I don't mind. Mostly, I think, because there is no traffic. From the time I hit the highway outside our house to the bottom of the mountain I see maybe a half dozen cars in either direction. It gets a little busier as I head to the base but it's nothing compared to the traffic in Las Vegas. Granted, the population is about a tenth the size. But also because the planners of Alamogordo did a little thinking.

There is a main street in Alamogordo called White Sands Blvd. It's the main throughfare through town. It can get crowded during 'rush hour' just because it's pretty much the street most businesses are on and there are a lot of stoplights. So the city planners built the Charlie T. Lee Memorial Relief Route, an expressway about a mile west of the main drag. I take it to the highway to the base. There are usually less people on it than there are coming down off the mountain (so about five). I'm glad it exists and I'm sure as Alamogordo grows it will be used more. But it seems like I'm the only one using it right now.

I also don't mind driving because my rental car has XM radio and they have a comedy channel. I like listening to music on the radio but this comedy thing is pretty cool. If the comedians are good I just get to laugh all the way to work. The downside is that XM radio has commercials. Isn't the point of satellite radio that it doesn't have commercials. Guess not. And they are the same commercials over and over again. All for male enhancement and home loans, I feel like I'm being internet spammed in my car. XM is also a lot like cable TV, I have over two hundred channels and I only listen to like eight of them. Oh well, it's nice to have and I get reception even in the mountains, except for a few minutes when I'm going through the tunnel, which is what the picture is, the tunnel to Cloudcoft.

Anyway, there is a moral to my tale. My brother once said I wasn't an outdoor kind of girl and I said I was, just not in Las Vegas where it's a hundred and ten degrees and desert. So I said I don't like driving but now I think I like driving, just not in Las Vegas where the traffic is heavy and the drivers are crazy.