Driving to Louisville

Yesterday morning I drove down I-71 to the south side of Louisville for the Kentucky Society for Technology in Education conference, which begins this morning. As luck would have it, a couple of hours after arriving at the conference location I had to drive back up to Carrollton (long, irrelevant story), so I got to make the drive into Louisville twice in one day. Maybe it was the fact that I made the trip twice, but two things that have always bothered me a little bit about the drive really stuck with me.

1. The road signs that point out the location of the infamous Carrollton bus crash always freak me out a little. Maybe people who drive by those signs all the time don't even notice them, but they bother me. I'm not sure what it is about them--maybe I feel like the area is haunted or something. But I always slow down and I always feel like I'm about to crash in that area.

2. On a lighter note, I've always been bothered by the fact that the interstate signs in Louisville have both metric and English measurements, and it bothers me that the English measurements are relegated to being inside of parentheses. Why does Louisville think it's not in the U.S.A.? Don't they know that no one in America has any idea what the metric system is? Are they trying to fry our brains as we do the .64 miles = 1 km adjustment? Are they trying to distract us in order to cause accidents so that their emergency vehicles can get some work in?

I think that's probably the case. In fact, whenever I'm in the Louisville metro area and I'm slowed down because of an accident on the interstate, I usually think to myself, "Yup, that guy probably crashed because of those metric signs. And now I'm going to be late because of them."