Five Minute Florida: Traffic

I’ve decided that there are aspects to my experiences in the Sunshine State that I won’t be able or might forget to cover in my regular posts. To deal with that problem, I’ve decided to create shorter segments entitle Five Minute Florida. Basically, I’ll take whatever topic I’d like to cover, write as much as I can in five minutes, and write one of these shorter segments as often as I can. It gives me the chance to write more often, and hopefully, it’ll bring some more regular readership to my blog. Today’s topic: traffic.

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Living in the area that I do, I don’t really have to deal with traffic all that much locally. There is a small downtown area in which the main street is kind of slow moving at certain times of the day, but I don’t live all that close to downtown Deland. I live more in the outskirts. I’ll delve more into that in one of the main sections of the blog. Traffic here is about like what you’d expect to find in Barboursville, WV. The area itself is similar to that of Huntington’s little sister city, too.

Living here and working at Walt Disney World, I have to travel down I-4, which runs right through the heart of Orlando. This is nothing like I haven’t experienced before. I’ve driven in NYC, Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Columbus, Atlanta, Nashville, and several other larger cities. The problem here is having to deal with the congestion and crazy drivers so often.

It’s a regular occurrence that I find the normal hour and fifteen minute drive to Lake Buena Vista where Disney is located taking closer to two hours. As you’ll learn later in the blog, it’s our intention to move closer to the city after our lease is up, though. Until that time, I’m stuck sitting in traffic. On top of that, I’ve never seen so many drivers who apparently don’t understand that their swerving from lane to lane, cutting other people off only exacerbates the problem.

There’s no avoiding the highways in Florida either. Since the state charges no income tax, there are tolls everywhere in order to collect money for road upkeep. Just for an example, on my way to rehearsal a last week, I went ahead and used the toll roads. Just to get to practice cost me an extra $6.00 in tolls, and that was only one way! I can’t afford that, obviously, and even if I could I wouldn’t want to pay it all the time. The only place I ever had to deal with tolls back home was on the turnpike. By the way, if you’ve never tried to go through there without cash, do yourself a favor and avoid the headache. Make sure you have cash on you before taking the West Virginia Turnpike; trust me!

I’m becoming more and more accustomed to the driving mentality here, but I can’t seem to adjust my mentality to fit. I still hang back and let people squeeze their car in the lane in front of mine, use my signals properly, and I even stop at all the stop signs still. The road rules in Florida are just one of many small ways that life is different from Mountain State. I can’t say it’s the worst thing ever, but it definitely ranks in the top ten headaches of all time.

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I've got a movie blog I update once a week, and a music blog I update once a day.