A Funny Feeling

Last week my brother came to see me. We had a lot of fun touring about Texas seeing the sites. I drove about 1500 miles so this weekend I will mostly be staying in Austin and riding my bicycle!

On the way back from Dallas to Austin we stopped in Waco for some Texas barbeque at Rudy’s. After pulling off the highway towards the restaurant a funny feeling came over me. I didn’t quite know what was going on, I was confused and I couldn’t work out why. Was it the tiredness of driving and playing rugby after a slightly late night at the chicken? dehydration? the couple of beers after the game?

And then I realised…

I was on a roundabout! You see, they don’t do roundabouts around these parts (but maybe they should). In fact, that is the third one I have driven on and only the fourth or fifth I have seen in America. It’s a good job they don’t have many of them because this was designed all wrong. The approach to the roundabout turned to merge into traffic. This meant that to see if any cars were coming from my left I had to look through my rear passengers’ window but to see if there were any vehicles on the roundabout I needed to look through the windscreen. I miss proper roundabouts. I think they would be the biggest problem for an american driver in the UK. Next time I’m home I’d like to go on the magic roundabout in Swindon. That thing is just genius.

Mainly I just like accelerating away from dual carriageway roundabouts in second and going through the gears up to 70 or 80 mph (remember that second to thrid shift in the VW Bert?). If you are lucky there will then be another roundabout to slow down for to repeat the process. This annoys Rebecca a lot when she is trying to sleep because she gets thrown around. But she annoys me by driving over speed bumps and making the bump be on my side of the car so I guess we are even!

Classic from the BBC

The president is better acquainted with baseball techniques than cricket.

This picture and caption are my favourite from a selection of very amusing pictures on the BBC website taken when George Bush tried his hand at cricket in Pakistan. The rest of the photos can be seen here. And the BBC is running a caption competition for one of them here.

Skunk Suicide Month

Today, on my drive along the presidential corridor, I saw an amazing amount of skunks. There was one every few miles. The had all expired already though and it made for a particularly unpleasant smelling trip.

After this I was not surprised to discover that the skunk is a very short lived animal and only around 10% survive past three years. This is partly due to the fact that they cannot see very well past 3 metres and because people like to run them over, shoot or poison them. Apparently it is breeding season at the moment so maybe the ones I saw were all the post-coital lethargic males. If that is the case, at least they died happy.