It’s Day 9 of the #AtoZchallenge2014, and once again I am posting late. Late, late, late. (I sound like a character in Alice in Wonderland.) (And heavens knows I’m all mad here…)

I’m sure my three (or four?) faithful readers are wondering what I chose to write about today. Was it “I” as in “me, myself, and __”? Nope.  (Tho, of course, “I” shall creep in here, as it is “I” writing this post…)

Was it insatiable? Invariably? Indubitably? Illnesses, invoices, ill-conceived haircuts?

Nope, nope, nope. Nope.

I is for Interstates

I bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you?

As I drove home today from school, on the lovely “connector”, as we Atlantans call the bit where Interstate 85 and Interstate 75 merge in the middle of the city, I pondered how different our country would be if good ole Ike hadn’t championed the system. Tho I’m sure someone would have at some point … after all, we Americans looooooveee us some cars.

The Interstate Highway plan from the January 1971 U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration Interstate System Route Log & Finder List. (Try saying that three times fast.) Image from Wikimedia Commons. This was the map in force when I was born.

Most of my formative memories involve interstates, or at least being in a moving vehicle.

When I learned to drive, I lived in West Palm Beach, Florida, so I spent a lot of time toodling up and down I-95 (at far faster speeds than I should have been…).

The part where hubs and I lived in Arkansas had no interstates at all, which was a bit hard to get used to. If you wanted to go somewhere, there was pretty much one, or maybe two, ways to get there. And when the road leading up to our house literally fell down the mountain? Well… that was something, and took well over a year to get fixed. (The DOT built us one lane quite close to that mountain, and you had to drive ever so carefully, and pray no one had ignored the traffic light and was coming the other way.)

Hotlanta, of course, is plumb covered up in interstates. You’d think with all them lanes and all that “open” road, you could get places quick, but noooo….. The saying “build it and they will come” certainly seems to work for Atlanta and interstates – the more roads that get built, the more cars there are!

The worst example of this car-filled interstates phenomenon was of course the Snowpocalypse back in January of this year (when it wasn’t so much snow as it was ice), and it looked like a scene from The Walking Dead (check out a pic here), and the always-hilarious Jon Stewart skewered our fair city in a bit he called “South Parked“.

I found this informative time-lapse on The Atlanta Journal-Constitution website, which was provided by GDOT and created by Georgia Tech and really shows what happened on the interstates that day….

Thank heavens I didn’t get stuck out in it, tho I know a lot of people who did…

Anywho, as I was saying (what was I saying?), if it weren’t for interstates, we wouldn’t get our amazon packages in two days, and it would take me a heck of a lot longer to get to work.

In other news, my partner Paul Feeney threw in the proverbial towel on the challenge with “G”. Poor guy’s trying to move, so I can’t blame him. But let’s all send good vibes his way. My other partner, Chad Clark, keeps on keeping on…  His monster additions since I last mentioned him include Faeries, Gorgon, Headless Horsemen, and Ittan Momen, something I’ve never even heard about!

See you sometime tomorrow! (Or today…)