Josh doesn't drive a lot, living in DC, so Donna forgets how completely insane he can be on the road.
She knows he grew up in Connecticut, which explains a lot about him, from his highminded political beliefs to his irrational insistence that the best pizza in the world comes from New Haven and with clams. Donna hasn't spent all that much time in his homestate, but there must be something in the water there, because they're on an unusually squiggly backroad somewhere in Pennsylvania and Josh is doing 50 in a 25 zone, taking every curve with an unflappable enthusiasm that's making her stomach crawl up her esophagus.
"Please, please slow down," she gasps, as they take a hairpin at a hair-raising speed, centripetal force pressing her against the passenger side door.
"We're already running late," Josh says, in his most reasonable tone of voice, the one that means he is, no questions asked, up to something totally unreasonable. A stop sign warning flashes by, and he eases on to the breaks. The way he breaks, slow and feathered and gentle, is the only thing about his driving that doesn't make Donna want to clamber out the sunroof of their rental.
"How does us dying, wrapped around a tree, help us be less late?"
He throws her a charming Lyman smile as he throws the car into first gear and rolls through the stop sign. "We're not gonna die, Donna. You don't know fear until you've driven in Redding at night."
"Do those two things have anything to do with one another? Cause it sounds to me like you just slapped a couple of non sequiturs together to distract me from our impending vehicular demise." As he manipulates the gearshift into third, Donna finds her hand creeping towards the overhead handle, what her sister had always called the "oh-shit" handle.
"My point is, I learned to drive on the backroads of Connecticut," Josh explains, and his eyes are at least on the twindy road now. "They're narrow and stupid and dangerous, and this has got nothing on them."
"Oddly, that does not comfort me at all."
A thing that Donna had not learned, growing up in Wisconsin, is that Connecticut drivers are delusional.
It's sort of a reasonable delusion; trapped between the assholes of New York and the lunatics of Massachusetts, people born and taught to drive in the Nutmeg State believe that they are God's gift to road safety. They let people make inconvenient left turns; they signal before each lane change on the highway; they take turns merging.
And they do all of these things at a minimum of forty miles an hour.
Josh's explanation for this, when she can get him to admit it, is that everything in his state is so spread out, you have to speed if you want to get anywhere in less than thirty minutes. The roads, he explains, are so folded in on themselves that any journey from point A to point B by car will take about twice the distance of a crow's flight.
And so, hairpins at fifty.