June 15, 2004: South end of IA 86 in Milford. I-90 is 23 miles north.
Because 86 north of IA 9 wasn’t a state highway until 30 years ago, it has no shoulder and a wicked pair of curves at the state line. Iowa plans on fixing that in 2013 (PDF).
My options for this number were limited. There is no US 86, and the interstates at either end of the country are among the few two-digit routes I haven’t traveled.
May 7, 2009: I-70 between I-270 and I-25. Notice the “Colo Spgs” in the background BGS for I-25. Also notice the wide numeral for US 6.
US 85 has an independent route until it gets south of Denver and then disappears until the Texas state line. The tiny segment in El Paso, less than 10 independent miles, isn’t worth the ambiguity. Either truncate it at Castle Rock and let the piece into Mexico get a different number, or get Colorado and New Mexico to sign the concurrent segments. (Colorado is notoriously bad at this. US 40 vanishes into the ether for many miles at a time.)
August 2001: Rest area in between the lanes on I-84/US 30 in Oregon at Multnomah Falls in the Columbia River Valley.
July 1, 2009: North end of I-283 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I-283 is the thru traffic while I-83 turns from east-west to north-south, to end at I-81 five miles north.
I-283 cannot be clinched without getting onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
This date has been used before.
May 20, 2003: North end of IA 82 in the same place it had been for over 80 years, but would only stay for 40 more days.
Blairstown, pop. 540 in 1920, got one of the original spur route, running south from the Lincoln Highway.
In addition to the new sets, its logo has noticeably changed for the first time in 20 years. The yellowish 3-D “9” has been around since 1989 and a form of that is still the focus, albeit slightly tilted.
It’s a big change for the eastern Iowa station. I hope there won’t be constantly moving background designs on what should be still frames.
The mob-rule.com website has been a county-collecting hub for years. Here’s my map. I’ve divided the past 14 years into two-year chunks, but won’t be switching this time for two reasons: I’m running out of colors, and in 2011 I visited two new counties.
Two. See the ones in Illinois in yellow? Yeah. Turns out it’s a lot harder to pick up new counties when it takes six straight hours of driving to get to the first one you haven’t touched yet.
The real news, though, is that recently Canada was added. Parts of Canada don’t have counties as they are in the U.S., though (it’s hard to get a moose to run for supervisor), so it uses a few different methods to split them up.
My three trips to the Great White North have yielded 55 counties/county equivalents in three provinces.
May 9, 2009: North of York, Nebraska, on my way back from Denver. I took US 34 through about the central third of Nebraska.
The 100-degrees-west line of longitude, which is still a ways west from here, is judged by one standard to be “where the plains begin” because that’s where rainfall patterns change. It even made it into a song. However, I would argue that US 81 — or even US 75 — is a little better indicator for travelers. Once you get west of it/those, the odds of easily finding a gas station, hotel, or food (particularly fast food) within half an hour start decreasing. (That’s especially true off the interstates.)
June 24, 2009: South end of I-380. Notice each shield has the state name on it. This interchange also includes the rare sighting of Exit 0.
But this page is for 80. I’ve been on it from its east end to Salt Lake City, and Sacramento to San Francisco — about three-quarters of the entire route.
June 25, 2006: One of the last photos I took with film, near Gitchie Manitou State Park
It’s been over five years since I bought my last Kodak product, a pair of disposable cameras in Mitchell, S.D., in 2006, when I feared my digital camera would leave me stranded again. Also, at the time, I found that film worked a little better than digital in dim conditions and facing the sun.
Before that, though, my family went through rolls of film like they were ice cream cones at the State Fair. The film camera I used in the late ’90s was a Kodak. My early years are captured in the square photos of the disc camera. I was George Eastman for Night of the Notables.
But with hiccups and exceptions, for the past decade but especially the past five years (after we stopped needing prints for the 4H record books), the images have piled up on hard drives instead of in boxes. Thus, I feel twinges of both nostalgia and guilt to learn that Kodak has filed for Chapter 11.
I didn’t use the cameras on that trip. Perhaps I should use them on the next. Time may be running out — the Southridge Target stopped processing film months ago.
