Tumbleweed Tag

My ranking of the worst states in the country to drive through:
1) New Jersey
2) Kansas
3) Illinois
4) Nebraska
5) Texas

Reasoning: New Jersey has a ton of traffic, and every car is driven by someone who is pissed about the fact they are in New Jersey. Jersey also makes you pay tolls in about the distance interval it takes my 15 year old Jeep to get back up to 70 mph after stopping for the previous toll. The tolls are also very odd amounts. Once I got stuck in this lane at the booth: "toll 65 cents, exact change only". I almost rear-ended another car because I was too busy frantically searching my car for a nickle.

Kansas and Nebraska are on there for the same reason. Both are very wide, flat, states that you always have to drive lengthwise across. Takes forever, nothing to look at. Kansas is worse than Nebraska because Nebraska at least has a river next to the road most of the way if you're on I-80. Illinois is in between these two states because while it's not quite as boring to drive through (though it's very close), Illinois one ups Kansas and Nebraska by adding traffic and tolls. The Chicago area is the Jersey of the Midwest, driving wise. However, while the boring scenery + traffic pushes Illinois past Nebraska, not even that combo can beat out the overwhelming blandness of Kansas.

And Texas? Well, I just plain don't like Texas.

And really, both Kansas and Nebraska should include Eastern Colorado. In many ways Eastern Colorado is worse to drive through than either of those states. It's even more desolate, and you keep expecting to see mountains and they take forever to show up.

The one saving grace about driving in eastern Colorado (or western Kansas or the TX or OK panhandles), is playing tumbleweed tag, seen in the video above. It's so dry in this region that all you need is one good windy day and half the dead bushes in the state are blowing across the road in front of you. Tumbleweeds are the one thing that is fun to hit with your car, because tumbleweeds shatter. You nail a big one and can look in your rear view mirror and see the broken remains flailing about the road. It's fun to be able to completely and utterly destroy something with no consequences, like throwing glass bottles into the recycling bin. After a good long stretch of tumbleweed tag I'll stop the Jeep and pause to remove bits of snapped off twigs stuck in its grill. Then I'll pat it on the hood, a job well done.

As you can probably tell, I didn't have video games growing up.