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American Road Magazine
Celebrating our two-lane highways of yesteryear…And the joys of driving them today!

mobilene

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Everything posted by mobilene

  1. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to back out of the weekend trip. I had to have my water heater repaired yesterday and the bill made it not make sense to take a pleasure trip this weekend. I hope you all have a grand time -- should be a great autumn day -- and I hope to join in on a trip with everyone in the spring. jim
  2. A fine explanation, Keep! I will point out that YouTube doesn't actually seem to want people to download their videos. But there are a couple services on the Internet that can do it for you anyway. I use www.keepvid.com. There are a few client-side FLV players available. I have used, and liked, this one: http://www.martijndevisser.com/blog/flv-player/. jim
  3. Or you could be hardcore like me and have a client-side player. My TV-clip hobby depends on that, since YouTube has become a major supplier of clips.
  4. Lord willing and the creek don't rise, I'm taking the Fall Foliage Tour with Pat, Jennifer, Denny, et al on Saturday. Then on Nov. 10, an old friend and I are going to go over the brick portions of the National Road in IL with a fine-toothed comb. We figure a lot of leaves should be down by then, helping us see stuff otherwise hidden by them. My friend showed me a brick segment of the road a couple months ago that I didn't find on my last trip -- on the other side of US 40 from where I thought the Road went through there. jim
  5. I hadn't seen it, and a short search didn't find it just now. I'll keep looking.
  6. Aaigh! This is causing me to lose all desire to test software (my line of work) today, and get in my car and drive to Maryland!
  7. Beautiful! I dove right into the first section. About four years ago I was in Baltimore on business (I worked for a Medicare contractor then; Balt is the world's epicenter of Medicare) and, quite by accident, ended up on US 40 and drove it all the way through town. It was quite an adventure. But I wasn't aware that it didn't follow the route of the old Road! And to think I was this close to the Road; Medicare imperial worldwide headquarters are on Security Blvd. just west of 695; a short jaunt down Rolling Rd. and I would have been there! Grr! Alas, this was before my roadgeekery went into full gear. Instead, I drove the other way up Rolling Rd. and had a fabulous meal at the Windsor Inn Crab House, which the government paid for. Not bad. Anyway, I appreciate your effort to document the route as best as possible given the tool you used. jim
  8. Who needs a stripe up the middle? The crack in the cement does the job! While driving at night, I live by the white line on the edge of the road. Especially in the rain. I honestly think I'd have to stay home at night if there were no white lines. I recently saw a 1939 photo of an Indiana numbered state road in Posey County that had no lines on it whatsoever. Seems odd to me, but I guess a paved road out in the sticks might have been a big deal then. Stripes were unheard of luxury. jim
  9. Which was a funny thing to say! Which, if you think about it, creates a paradox. Unless you didn't know you were saying something funny, of course. Anyway, Chris, I'm glad you found us here. I have found that it doesn't matter how far into the depths of my road-geekery I reach, if I bring it up here, people respond enthusiastically! Now, Denny said that only two IN milestones exist, and none in IL. I was not aware that IL or IN had any! I surmise that the two left in IN must be out east, probably close to OH. I haven't followed the NR in eastern IN yet, in no small part because my research shows that US 40 follows the old road pretty closely. As anyone here can tell you, I live for the old alignment, and if it's abandoned, all the better. That's why I've enjoyed your photos -- lots of old road. I would very much enjoy a CD of the USGS topos along the Road. I'm in no hurry, though; I've got a couple short trips planned for Nov, but after that I'm hanging it up until the spring. On the right side of the page, scroll down to the Additional Information section. Under the copyright notice there's an item telling where the photo was taken, with (map) in parentheses. "map" is a link; click it to see the photo's position on the map. Peace, jim
  10. Very cool!!! Last time I was at the Archive, they didn't have the built-in player, which was a welcome addition. Loved the yellow stop sign at 2:13. I remember bad dirt roads like those in this film -- from my time in southwestern Michigan in the 70s. jim
  11. I certainly agree that it is better to replace a stone, when necessary, with something as close to the original. But given the order-of-magnitude cost difference between the fiberglass and iron markers, wow, I'm not a bit surprised that some places go with the fiberglass. I think the history is lost when the original marker is lost, and that replacement markers are a mere shadow. I'm just glad that there is enough care to replace them at all. jim
  12. This is saving me sooooooooo much research for when I make the trip out east!
  13. One of the blogs in my feed reader today led me to this Flickr group: http://www.flickr.com/photos/54177448@N00/...57602078306337/ These are b/w Polaroids of what appear to be freshly installed signs, taken by a sign-company employee in the 1960s. They're from Washington state -- anyone here with experience from that corner of the 48 know any of these locations? jim
  14. Sweetness! Not sure why, but these took for bloody ever to download here. So I sat in extreme antici......pation. But that just heightened the enoyment once they arrived! I especially liked seeing all the shots of the '57 Ford in the Sonora Pass video. My dad had a '57 Ford at about the same time jim.
  15. The front is also painted red now, per photos I found on the Web! I can't imagine even trying to sleep by the side of the road today. Not only would you get visited by the state police and asked to move along, you'd be at risk of being robbed! I like sunsets and canyons and seagulls in art shots. But when I look back through old photos, what really interests me is seeing how things used to be. I have a great photo of my mom and my grandparents leaning on the hood of my dad's baby blue '66 Galaxie 500 two-door, on the "driveway" of my grandparents' lake property in southern Michigan. Mom was pregnant with me. My grandparents were younger then than my parents are now. That's the stuff. Especially to see Dad's Galaxie again. jim ps. My previous avatar was the taillight of a '66 Galaxie.
  16. Keep: I loved those videos! It was great to vicariously drive over that covered bridge through your film given that it's been closed to vehicular traffic for 26 years now! And I loved seeing all the old cars when they were new(er) along the street in Virginia City. I'm sure preparing these for us is time-consuming, but I'll happily watch any more you post. I've been to Mt. Lassen, so I at least have experience with the area in that film! (My ex-wife's uncle owns a sheep ranch near Redding, and we went up to se Lassen when we visited in '95.) Cityboy: I've never heard northwestern Indiana compared to northeastern Mississippi before. Well, at least not in terms of landscape. People often use Indiana and Mississippi in the same sentence when talking about poverty and literacy, sad to say. Anyway, I'm about blown away that you recognized the tune. Dunno why that one sticks in my mind when my favorites include Stephen Arnold's "Signature," Frank Gari's "Pride Inside," and the theme WNEW used from '77 to '84. Guess the Dick Marx tune is just easier to whistle . jim
  17. And Keep -- don't get me started on my TV collection. I can quickly wear you out on it. Just like I wear out my friends when I talk about my roadgeekery.
  18. What a fabulous story! I would love to see the photos if you can ever scan them. jim
  19. It's remarkable, isn't it, how a humdrum snapshot of a place can be exciting 30 years later just because so much of that place has changed? This link is to a photo of a Burger Chef under construction on the corner of 25th St. and Wabash Ave. (US 40) in Terre Haute, IN, in August, 1965, two years before I was born. When I arrived in Terre Haute almost exactly 20 years later, the Burger Chef had been converted to a Hardee's, and the Chauncey Rose Home in the background had been torn down in favor of a lousy strip mall with a K-Mart at one end. Today, 22 years later, the Hardee's has been torn down, the K-Mart is gone, and the strip mall is spiffy with a new Kroger at one end. I wish I had a photo from my first days in Terre Haute for comparison! And as I write in this blog post, I remember once seeing an early-1940s photo from the front lawn of my grade school that shows a big field to the school's east -- a field on which my parents' house now sits, and has since 1951. Several roads that are there today had not been built yet at the time of the photo. It was very strange to see! jim
  20. My dad used to work at the Oliver factory in South Bend in quality control.
  21. One of my other hobbies is collecting audio and video clips from vintage television. I'm not quite sure how I fell into this hobby, but I've been at it for years. The centerpiece of that collection is a pretty large set of local news clips, mostly opens. For some reason, that day, a news theme used on several major-market CBS stations in the 70s was running through my head. It's called "I Love Chicago, Chicago My Home," and it's written by Dick Marx. Here's a link to a 1977 promo from WBBM in Chicago that uses the theme. The video quality is lousy, but the audio is pretty good. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oHsJk0i0mE Whoakay, could it possibly get more obscure? jim
  22. Wait... You mean the Dixie Highway guide sends people away from the Dixie Highway south of Indy? (insert puzzled look)
  23. Fabulous! I'd like to drive it south from here today! But my employer might not like that.
  24. A bunch of friends of mine cruised from Terre Haute, IN to Helena in about 1988 for this blues fest. (One of those friends was from Helena.) I couldn't go for whatever reason and I've always regretted it!
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