It's Interesting

Earlier this week I blogged about Maps Home. I enjoyed writing it almost as much as I enjoyed imagining my path of travel during a slightly dead moment of my day.

Today I put that theoretical purple line to practice as I laced my way through the suburbs and then zippped southwestward across the state. As it turns out, long drives give you time to think and sometimes you end up thinking about out-of-the-way things.

Take the very notion of interstate driving for example. Have you ever thought about the mechanics of the system? The physical and theoretical guts ticking away behind the scenes to bring functionality to the largest network of roads in the world? For example, from the moment I rolled on to I-290 in the northwestern suburbs to the moment I rolled off I-72 in South Jacksonville, I was on one seemingly endless stretch of pavement. I didn't have to stop my car even for the briefest of moments. I realize that this is sort of the point of the system and to marvel over it is sort of like marveling over the earth-shattering technology of a toaster but it's still interesting to think about if really let yourself.

The way the roads are marked is also interesting. At any given entrance, a particular highway might seem to stretch straight north and straight south, for example, but, in the grand scheme of things, this road might actually end up dead-ending at, let's say, the west coast which is not at all north or south. Tricky, no?

The text on any given interstate sign follows a similar pattern and this all gets to the heart of what I like to call the "final destination." It's sort of like riding the Metro in Paris (or any other major public transportation system). You might only be going from Louvre Rivoli to Concorde--two stops down on line one--but you travel in the direction of La Defense--the end of the line. It isn't really complicated but the logic does take a second.

And so today, as I was driving, I risked life and limb (the road was practically empty) to snap this quick picture (while somehow keeping both hands on the wheel) as I ramped up, over, and around (it was safe, dammit!) on a winding path towards home. It's simply interesting.

As an analytical sentimentalist, nothing thrilled me more than seeing a Chicagoland sign that simultaneously pointed and didn't point to home. Was I traveling to St. Louis? No. But that sign meant that the particular branch of twisty, rampy, seemingly unending pavement would eventually spit me out somewhere between St. Louis and Chicago. And it did. And now I'm home.