Driving down the highway on my way home today, enjoying the sudden fall colors, I began thinking about how strange and utterly different it looked.

Turns out it looked that way because it is strange and utterly different.

My first piece of evidence: not more than a quarter of a mile down the highway, I stopped for gas, which was priced at $3.29 a gallon. The CHEAPEST gas stations along the highway had prices to the tune of $3.59. Closer to home, it was $3.79. I’m planning to dig out my AAA card tonight in case I discover tomorrow that my gas tank is now filled with used french fry oil.

I returned to the road for another handful of miles before I hit a DISASTROUS traffic jam. This was the sort of traffic jam where things are moving so slowly that your car actually starts going backward. I slunk along behind a truck at around 0.003 mph for about eight hours. No sign of any impediment to traffic presented itself. A few miles down the road, the traffic suddenly picked up again.

So I drove down the highway cheerily for some time, and had almost gotten into autopilot when I had to suddenly swerve into the right lane because there was a huge truck tire right in the middle of the center lane of the interstate highway. Now, that’s something you’d expect to stop traffic, yet the actual traffic jam was about ten miles back in an area with no trouble whatsoever.

Stopped at a traffic light after quitting the highway, I amused myself by watching the drivers in the cars passing in the other direction. I’d estimate that at least 20 percent were talking on their cell phones while executing steep turns.

You’d think that being “distracted from distraction by distraction,” as T.S. Eliot put it, would make them a little slower to respond to stimuli, but this would be a false assumption. I was honked at repeatedly by at least four or five cars when I chose not to make a right on red into a lane with no space left. I’ve been harassed around that same intersection before for deciding not to run over pedestrians and failing to play chicken with an oncoming bus.

So I think I have a pretty good case for saying that this is a bizarre highway.

For the most part, though, I was too busy enjoying the fall foliage to care.