Thickly Settled

iPhone shot…no idea what the settings were.

In the burbs around Boston I occasionally came across a “Thickly Settled” street sign.  It struck me as rather funny and while I expected that it had something to do with it being a more crowded residential area, it really was meaningless.  After all, I could see with my own eyes that I was in a residential neighborhood.

I looked it up and found all sorts of humorous comments about this and other street signs.  “Slow Children” elicited a comment along the lines of “When I see a Slow Children sign I always wonder how all the slow children all ended up living in one neighborhood.”  The best I can gather (I did not bother to dig into the MA government sites to verify this) is that the Thickly Settled sign is an indication to observe a speed limit of 30 mph even if it is not posted.  I’m not entirely sure why they don’t just post the speed limit itself if they’re going to bother with putting up a sign at all.  Maybe I’m wrong about all this…

On a semi-random note, I’ll give a shout out to Enterprise Car Rental since you can (barely) see the hood of my rental in the picture above.  I typically rent from Hertz through my company.  I have Hertz #1 Gold which allows me to bypass the rental car checkin. Having #1 Gold means I just show up in the Hertz garage, find my name and parking spot on the display, and the car is waiting in that parking spot with the keys and paperwork in it, ready to go.  Pretty convenient.  This time my admin set me up with Enterprise which was only $17 per day for an “intermediate” car.  I arrived at the Enterprise counter in Boston sometime around midnight and after checking in asked if I had any choices regarding cars.  The agent asked what I drive at home — a 4×4 crew cab pickup truck. Upon hearing that she said that since it was midnight I could pick anything in the lot at the $17 price, but mentioned that the sweet, black 2012 Chevy Tahoe might be best suited to my tastes.  True enough…nice!  Especially nice because I had added some personal time to my trip and was paying some of the days out of my pocket.  I’ll pay $17 a day for a new Tahoe anytime.