Yesterday I was driving with students in a rural area. It was a really windy day with lots of leaves blowing around. First, one car flashed high-beams at us, and having just talked about this in class the day before, we went through our mental checklist of possible motives.
Were our headlights on? Yup
High beams? Nope
Were we at an intersection where they were telling us to go? Nope
Did we know them? Nope
Is there a police officer ahead? Why tell the driver’s ed car who is clearly going the speed limit? (You should never do this, by the way, you may be telling a bad guy where the police are.)
We give up, maybe it was a mistake or there is something ahead we need to worry about. We kept going, and a second car flashed at us. Now we’re really curious. One more bend in the road revealed the mystery.
We saw a huge tree had come down across the road in the wind. We slowed way down trying to see if we could squeeze by on the right. As we did so, a car coming towards us just went around coming all the way over onto our side to do so. Now, this was wrong. If the hazard on the road is on your side, it is your problem, so he should have waited for us to go. After he passed, we very carefully went through the ends of the branches pushing us onto the shoulder, but we managed to get by.