A decade ago, I took pictures from the front seat of the van on a couple of trips to Waterloo and Ames. Here’s one of them, taken months after IA 27 was first commissioned.
Although I used few or none of them, it was the beginning of a concentrated effort to document Iowa’s highways and what you see at their endpoints. (Yes, I know this is not an endpoint.) I started setting up the website a couple of weeks later and did a full launch in December.
Ten years and many pixels later — the above photo didn’t need to be shrunk — I alternate between my third and fourth digital cameras and have upgraded computers twice. (However, my newest photo editing software doesn’t seem to be as smooth when scaling pictures.)
As I tried to figure out the best way to mark the event, I also wondered if there was a way I could share some of the photos that otherwise would not appear on this site.
That gave me the idea to set up a new series of timed blog posts. Starting today, and continuing every 12 or 24 hours afterward, a new photo will appear. The photos won’t be random; they’ll be sequential. The first one will include a shield with the number 1, the second will include a shield with a number 2, and so on. Almost immediately, I realized I couldn’t limit the series to Iowa, since Iowa hasn’t had an IA 11 for 70 years, so the entire country is open.
I’m going to sort through my thousands of photos and find out just how far up I can go. I’ll also keep an eye on trying not to repeat dates or counties in the series until I have to.
This also happens to be my 100th blog post. I hadn’t planned on this many by now, but Texas A&M and Missouri “realigned” that expectation.