Friday 9 February – Boston / Salem NH

Have been working up at Salem, New Hampshire (NH) all week. Only about a 35 minute drive, however two contrasting places. There’s no snow on the ground in the city. However, if you drive north for 10 minutes, there starts to be a bit. When you get to Salem, the ground is completely white.

The behaviour of drivers over here is a little bit different. The following points spring to mind:

• There is a lot more tailgating compared to Australian drivers. If you’re in the ‘fast’ lane – which is the left one over here – and there’s a car in front of you holding you up, rest assured there’ll be someone who’ll come and sit right up your backside until you both can get through. And there’s every chance it will be at 110 to 120 km/h.
• There’s a lot more accidents over here that I’ve seen, particularly someone having run up the backside of another. Refer to the comment above and you can put 2 and 2 together – and surely get 4!
• Despite being more aggressive to others in a car, the drivers here are far more friendly to pedestrians than in Oz. Throughout the city on the less busy streets, drivers quite often will stop to allow you to cross in front of them.
• There’s a lot of merging without indicating, particularly on the freeways. And with the greater variance in speed between the slow and fast cars (travelling in the right hand lane generally results in speeds of 110 to 120 km/h), I think I can see (again) why I've seen so many accidents.
• Touch parking (hitting either of the other cars in front or behind you while trying to fit into a parallel spot) seems to be almost accepted here. We watched tonight from the pub as a bloke gave a BMW parked behind him two decent ‘lovetaps’, so much so that the Beamer moved, but proceeded to get out of his car, not even check out the damage and/or bat an eyelid, grab his takeaway chow and drive off. No number left or anything, but it seems to be a common thing as I’ve seen it a number of times – and I’ve seen cars that have been parked while still touching!