Category: traffic violation

Come Blow Your Horn- But Not At a Cop

by Larry Teren

It’s one thing to enter an expressway on an entrance ramp from a regular road at a reduced speed limit. It’s another to get onto a highway by getting off another one, especially trying to stay with the flow of traffic. Do you hear that, copper?

 

Does it make me an old fogy that I don’t look forward to taking the expressway when I have to drive a long distance? It’s not the speed of the highway that intimidates me as much trying to get on and off it at those stupid cloverleafs. Legend has it that the engineer who designed the famous dangerous “S” curve on Chicago’s Outer Drive committed suicide as he was despaired by all the deaths and major lifelong injuries he caused. About ten years or so ago, someone with an ounce of brains at a Federal Agency decided to donate some money to the City of Chicago to fix the problem and straighten the swish in the road as much as possible.

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Midnight Express

Did you ever spend a night in jail in Bulgaria with two high-stepping Commie soldiers pointing AK-47 rifles at you? My brother Gary who prefers to be called Terry did.

In the late 1980’s he and Mark, a good friend, were in an overseas student exchange program. They decided to take the Orient Express train from Vienna, Austria to Istanbul, Turkey while on semester break. They boarded the train not thinking they would need a visa to pass through Bulgaria which was part of the Soviet Bloc at that time. They believed that as long as they were on the train everything would be fine. Except, the local KGB didn’t agree. Once the train stopped at the Communist depot, several soldiers boarded and just as in all those old spy movies, the uniformed and armed men started going from seat to seat checking papers. Gary/Terry naturally had his American passport but did not have a visa to enter into a Soviet country. He and his buddy Mark were summarily taken off the train, their passports confiscated and the boys were put in jail.
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