Stream Pull-Off or Crowded Mall Parking?

With only an hour or so remaining before dark, Asher and I thought we would hit one more pool before we started toward home. Plenty of other folks had been enjoying the river that day, so we'd not yet been able to sample one particular normally productive pool that had a pull-off beside it. We figured we'd finish with that one, if it was open.

As we approached from upstream, with the river and the pull-off to our left, we were happy to see that the spot was unoccupied. Two vehicles were just leaving another pull-off, a couple of hundred feet downstream and facing us. I turned on my left turn signal, stopped and waited for them to pass before we pulled into the pull-off.

To my shock, the driver of the front vehicle then turned on his right signal and both cars turned into the very spot I was waiting to turn into -- which was only footsteps from where they had just left. I felt like I was at the mall the week before Christmas, when everyone was frantic to find somewhere to park.

I resisted pulling in anyway and hopping out, just to make sure they knew they'd just cut off a 10-year-old. Instead we moved downstream a little farther and finished in a pool we'd already fished.