yeah. I foolishly thought that if I booked the hotel a hundred metres from where I’d be working, I wouldn’t need a car. Nope.

Also something about the way the cops carry themselves make you feel less safe to see them, rather than more safe. And for a “land of the free” there seems to be so many rules and warnings absolutely everywhere just waiting to trip you up.

I’m reluctant to name individual incidents because the dynamic of forum posts suggests that some smartass will leap in to say “oh that never happens in your country?”, but I can only relate my own experiences, e.g. beggars waiting at junctions going up to my car to ask for money, or a road rage guy in a huge truck that followed me many miles back to my hotel to shout at me for turning into the lane he was trying to turn into. Yeah it can happen in other places, but to me it happened in the US.

In total I’ve been to 10 different states, spanning a period of over a year, and concluded that the US is basically everything they accuse their enemies of being.