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.
August 14, 2005: For an awkward time after the Second Great Decommissioning, Louisa and Des Moines counties tried this “neither-fish-nor-foul” naming convention. It was particularly odd in this case, when IA 79 had been J20 before 1980.
All of this has changed. US 34 is now on a freeway to the north, while J20 runs west. The designation for old 34 is unknown.
October 29, 2004: East end of IA 78 in Louisa County. The mileage sign in the background shows the distance to…nothing. Instead of covering up the top line, the “99” on the shield was removed when IA 99 was decommissioned.
The Des Moines Register reports that the Federal Highway Administration has approved plans for the Alice’s Road interchange on I-80. It is scheduled to open within two years.
This is the recently built Alice’s Road bridge as seen from the rest area in mile 118 in July 2010. Here’s an aerial view. It seems like it would be difficult to put an interchange there, let alone “open hundreds of acres for development,” without removing the rest area.
If you zoom out from that view, you can see how open the area is…for now. But just as urban sprawl has consumed the I-35 rest area near Ankeny, this one is likely doomed as well.
