The Toad is a jerk
I need to vent a story from yesterday's ride ... I feel like a jerk, but also know that I wasn't really 'wrong', it was just a bad situation. Here's what happened:
I was riding a narrow, twisty-rolling, busted up road with 30 mph speed limit. I ride the road often and know it well, there's no shoulder so I take the lane. It gets a fair amount of traffic, but slow speed limits keep it generally calm. I use a Varia radar, so I know a car was coming for a pass. This vehicle was close enough to see in my peripheral vision, the vehicle was in the oncoming lane, yielding good space and had good sight lines for oncoming traffic. Next thing I know, there's a long horn blast. I assume that the person passing is trying to scare/intimidate me. I reacted with an wave and blowing kisses (obnoxious, but not vulgar). A short distance up the road, the vehicle is next to me again and the person is upset and yelling something I can't make out. I'm keeping it 'clean', but not exactly nice. Then I pick up her saying a car just about pulling out of a driveway in front of her. The woman pulls off the road and I stopped at her passenger window to talk. She was very shaken. As we talked, I started to understand that as she was in the on-coming lane, a car making at right turn out of a driveway had only looked to their left and failed to see the vehicle passing me. Her horn was to get the attention of the person coming out of the driveway. I apologized for my misplaced reaction and thanked her for keeping me safe and avoiding a wreck. I felt bad, knowing that if I'd been driving that road to pass a person biking, I'd been upset and scared from the situation.
I really felt dumb for my reaction to the horn. I will keep this as a lesson going forward to observe the situation before reacting to horns. It's an iteration of lessons I've learned over many years, like controlling the urge to give a one-finger salute to every horn (like I did in my college days).
Just need to share the story and get it off my chest.