“Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.” – Charles Kuralt
I’ve traveled every single inch of I-65, and that’s the only interstate for which I can say that (excluding spurs and bypasses). I love interstate travel. I continue to be amazed at the predictable, reliable results it delivers. I love the mile markers ticking off. I love determining an arrival time based on average speed—figuring stops, and weather, and whatever—all stuff with which I mentally entertained myself long before a $100 GPS receiver made it trivially easy.
I also hate interstate travel, for exactly those same reasons. What do you do? What do you see? Yay, Stuckey’s! (You know, I suppose.)
But for every bit of its length, I-65 periodically intersects with U.S. 31. Sometimes I think about taking some time off and driving to Canada on 31. It’d be a fun thing to do with a vacation, would it not? Just leave without any sort of plan, and have an old-school road trip, doing whatever hits your fancy along the way? (I think I’ll keep the electronic ignition and microprocessor-controlled combustion of a modern car, though, so I wouldn’t quite be kicking it old school authentically.) I bet I could get some killer geocaching done.
Perhaps it will be a guys’ trip I take sometime, as Lea generally likes a vacation to include immediate proximity to an ocean.
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Traveling along rural highways is the only way you are going to see the back scratchin’ post in Hot Coffee, MS, or Hazel’s Cafe aka Big Momma’s as noted on the shingle, or a tree mysteriously filled with pairs of sneakers (I really want to know the story behind that one). The only drawbacks are when you get stuck at a bunch of traffic lights in a moderately-sized community or have to go through painfully slow speed traps.
I’m going with Lea