Driving Experience

This happened about a year ago. I drove my car over to a R.C. Airplane meet that was located about 20 miles from my home. It was in mid June, about 100degrees during the day but around here, it cools off nicely when the sun goes down. It sun was just setting when I left about 8:30 and I decided to take the long way home. There are two routes, one using standard highways, the other using a little traveled road that runs across the top of a high ridge. This road has lots of curves and in a performance car is a lot of fun to drive. I took the ridge route, not driving too fast because there is some traffic but since you can see around the corners there are places where you can kick it up a little. The most fun part of the trip is coming down a hill making a right hand jog into a sweeping left hand climbing curve. The road goes straight for a couple of miles, all sage brush and farm land. You can see almost to the end where you turn onto another highway. Getting to the bottom of the hill, windows down, I was really enjoying the drive, idling imagining myself as Ken Miles at Sebring. I Ran it up to about 7000 in second gear and pushed it into 3rd. About the time I was pulling it into 4th and thinking this was the fun part of owning one of these cars, I caught something out of the corner of my eye up the hill. As I went by at about 80, the snapshot I saw was four people with bicycles standing about 50 feet off the road in the middle of the sage brush. They were staring at me and had the “deer-in-the-headlights” look on their faces. The first thought I had was “What are those idiots doing up there? Don’t they know this place is named Rattlesnake ridge for a reason?” Then it dawned on me. They had probably been listening to my Shelby from the time I turned on to the ridge route. They didn’t know what was making so much noise, but as it got closer they were sure not going to be on the highway when it went past and decided to take their chances with the rattlesnakes. I kept right on going. No reports of anyone being bitten by a snake, thankfully there are no Cobras in the area.