I love living in Royal Oak. There are three great grocery stores within biking distance of my house, lots of great places to eat, an awesome movie theater, and people walking their dogs always stop and let you pet them.
However, it’s that time of year when I start questioning the wisdom of living here. The Woodward Dream Cruise. That street-clogging, noise-making, litter-causing, life-disrupting pain in the ass that gets longer and longer every summer.
The cruise is technically one day, Saturday the 18th. As early as Monday, however, people have started with the bullshit. Chairs lining the streets and medians, cars starting to cruise already. Lines at stores are getting longer and the parking lots and side streets are getting jammed with spectator’s cars. By Saturday, it will be impossible to find a parking spot in the city and forget about actually using Woodward to get somewhere.
I live 4 blocks from Woodward, and the noise is incredible. Cars revving, drunk assholes walking back to their cars after dark, burnouts and squealing tires. Not to mention the litter they leave everywhere. Beer cans, fast food wrappers, all the stupid freebies that cruise sponsers give out.
I don’t understand the appeal of sitting in the sun on a camp chair and watching cars drive around, but that’s okay. I’m sure I have hobbies that other people think are stupid. It’s just the goddamn disruption that I hate. Stupid fucking Dream Cruise, go away!
If someone parks in my driveway this year, I’m having their asses towed.
Wow, not a single response? Not one?! Color me embarrassed. No one on the board lives in any of the nine cities that the cruise runs through and has an opinion? No one agrees with me that it’s a pain in the ass? No one wants to defend it?
Alright, then how about rants about things that happen in your city that disrupt your life? Got any of those?
So you have a problem with an event that causes you to be unable to go from one side of a major road that divides the metro area to the other? I guess that is why I don’t go anywhere near it either.
Well, thanks to the Dream Cruise I was able to get my Mother In Law in trouble with my Grandmother in Law.
She traveled back there during cruise week a few years ago and decided, with her sisters, that they just HAD to get their (deceased) dad’s stylish old car out of the garage and join the fun. So they go cruising, and wouldn’t you know it? The brakes catch on fire. Such a funny story, ha ha ha, etc etc.
A year or so later, the inlaws all gathered together for some holiday thing, and the Dream Cruise came up. So I say “Was that the thing where you caught the car on fire?” How was I supposed to know they told their mother some cockamamie story to cover their 50+ year old asses?
They do this for an entire weekend in my old hometown.
I’m so glad I’ve moved.
The worst part is the people who don’t belong there, who fall into two categories in my experience:
the guys in the 87 trans-am t-top that’s rusting and four colors of paint, but damn well THEY think it’s a cool car so it’s cruising.
The three hundred identical guys in the 2007 Mustang Cobra, the one hundred identical guys each in the 2007 Camaro and 2007 Corvette, and the two dozen identical guys in the Viper and Porsche Low-Endster. Yeah. You have a lot of money. You also look like a retard in a scaled-up Shriner parade with all the identical cars.
Sorry. Closest I could think of was the ‘Lucid Dream Cruise’ and he’s just a Scientological***** nut-job. Not that you wouldn’t pull up a chair just to watch him melt down.
“Ooooh! Pretty colors…!”
*****its just as much a real word as Scientology is a real religion. Rattlesnaked mailboxes sold seperately.
IMO, if you live in a place that you love for 364 days a year, one day of inconvenience is a pretty damned minor thing to get your panties knotted up about.
In Detroit, the event lasts the weekend, but people start the week before. It keep growing, and growing, and…
Meanwhile, some people have to use Woodward as a means of actually getting places, so folks doing 25 MPH in their classic autos really cause a problem in the 50 MPH zone…
Ha! Here we just finished with Hot August Nights, which is three days of every major street in Reno being clogged with beautiful old cars that go approximately 5 mph and make me nervous as hell because I’d probably be run out of town on a rail if I so much as breathed on one of them, since they bring so much business to Reno and all that. The entire downtown gets closed off, every hotel and motel within 50 miles of here fills up, it takes an hour to drive anywhere…it’s really just best to get out of town for the weekend (which is exactly what we did).
But wait, it’s gets better! We still have Street Vibrations coming up, where thousands of loudly farting motor cycles come to town and buzz up and down Virginia street at volumes that rattle my windows, and weave precariously in and out of traffic at insane speeds, giving me a heart condition.
It’s important not to take it personally if nobody posts to a thread you’ve started.
Especially in the Pit, sometimes folks read it and then move on, because they just didn’t have anything to add to the rant. I note that you’ve had 450 people read your thread; just because only nine of them have actually posted a response doesn’t mean that the Straight Dope Message Board is collectively giving you the brushoff. It just means that 441 people couldn’t really think of anything to add.
When I used to live near Reno I loved to go down to Hot August Nights, but that was until the powers that be killed the one good Oldies channel in Reno and turned it into this 70’s easy listening abomination. You can’t have cruising classic cars without The Beach Boys or Chuck Berry playing, it just…isn’t right.
Sounds to me like they’ve done you the dubious service of deciding for you when you ought to be out-of-town on vacation each year!
In my book, if you like where you are living 51 weeks out of the year, you’re ahead of the game. At best, I’m “meh” about my town year-round. Counting down the days til my kids are out of high school when I’ll move.
We’ve got the Route 66 celebration in downtown San Bernardino. It’s gotten really big over the last few years, but the good news is that I live a couple of towns away. I can go down and check it out if I want, but mostly I don’t see any of it if I don’t want to. I grew up there, and I’m grateful that I don’t live there anymore. If they did that here in our town, we’d all be stuck in our houses for four days.
I love the classic cars and the burnout competitions! It’s usually too friggin’ hot to bother with it, though. It happens in September, and it’s just no fun to go sweat your ass off in a crowd just to see some neat cars. The spectators sure do make a mess out of the place, too.
The only city festival that really gets under my skin is the bike ride through Redlands that they do once a year. Those bastards make it impossible to do anything in that town, and it just so happens that I have a couple of places I go that I can’t avoid having to deal with it.
I guess I don’t have much of a point in regards to the OP, except to say that yeah, it sucks. Sorry.
It’s a little different, but I hate the Grand Prix. Nobody can talk about anything else, and it gets downright dangerous to cross the streets downtown because every jackoff in a Honda thinks they’re Jacques fucking Villeneuve.
I live in DC. There is always something I don’t really care about disrupting traffic. I used to live in Roslyn, about half a block from where the Marine Corps Marathon used to run. I’m pretty used to having my daily routine and commute screwed up by things. Be happy it is only one day a year.
I had to drive from Denver to Ft. Collins yesterday behind 30,000 middle aged Harley riders riding 9 abreast at 65 mph on an interstate with a 75mph speed limit.
At least it is going to be quiet around here for the next week or two. Sturgis is about the last place on earth I would like to be right now.
I never heard of this before, but my company just hired a new CEO named Woodward, and I thought to myself, “Holy Shit! This guy is way more popular than I ever thought.”
