Prompt Response: Don’t Tailgate!
from Gemini Nano Banana, Wombo Dream AI, and Photo Studio Pro
What’s one piece of travel advice you always follow?
This is important travel advice for everyone on the road. It’s especially important when you are sharing the road with big rigs. I learned this lesson from a trucker when I spent about 18 months traveling for my photo studio sales job.
So, I was late in life learning to drive because I lived in a city with many buses that could get me almost anywhere I needed to go. When I moved back to my favorite desert town on Route 66, then I needed to learn how to drive. I was in my twenties and learned as I drove a VW Squareback from LA to Kingman loaded with all my belongings. My stepdad was coaching me over the CB radio, and he taught me about using the draft from a truck to save fuel.
Fast forward to my job with Parkway Studios where I was on the road for long stretches between sales locations. Chatting with drivers via CB kept me awake and entertained. I was in Utah following a couple drivers I’d met over breakfast at the truck stop. It was great to be able to talk about The Lord and hope others might hear an encouraging word. And when other drivers would key up with foul language, there was almost always a driver who would let the others know there was a lady on the air, and they would usually respect that.
The respect went both ways, so I asked the drivers I was following if they minded me riding in their draft. Their reply was not unkind, but it was quite vehement. (The definition of vehement is “showing strong feeling, forceful, passionate, or intense.) It turns out that it was a very unsafe practice that could’ve meant ending up with a layer of re-tread tire 🛞 coming right through my windshield. What? Why did someone teach me something so unsafe? I guess because my dad never asked an actual truck driver what they thought of the practice. Plus, you see the signs on trucks that say how if you cannot see their mirrors, they cannot see you. Beyond that, I was traveling with hubby when a truck two lanes away and a few car lengths ahead of us blew a re-tread. It sounded—and felt—like an explosion even from that distance. So that advice from that driver was accurate and possibly life-saving.
In case you’re like a friend who was told that if you could see the tires on the car in front of you, you’re not tailgating, throw out that advice and remember this: when the car in front of you passes something like a pole or a mile marker, count the seconds to see when you pass the same item. You should get to two and a half seconds for the safest spacing. Or, you can just tell yourself to keep between two and three lengths of car between you, but I find it easier to count seconds. After a while, you’ll just know.
Beyond that, I could give you a list of travel hints and tricks and games, but maybe I’ll save that for a future post. I will add one piece of advice you’ve probably never thought about. If hotel and guest beds are often uncomfortable for you, get yourself a full-length pregnancy pillow. You don’t have to be pregnant to find a world of comfort in those. They lift your body away from hard mattresses, and the long ones can bend under your knees to elevate them as well—especially if you sleep on your back. I’ll add a link for one of them I purchased from Amazon that’s extra soft and can squish down into a large suitcase. I have a super large suitcase where I stuff one of those and a memory foam pad because of my fibromyalgia, but I recently used just the pregnancy pillow with success. Maybe it will help one of my readers as well.
I’ll close with one other observation about tailgating: Just imagine if the two vehicles getting too close to each other were trains or airplanes. See, safe distance is your friend. 😁
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