“Almost home” is about 10% of the journey. So coming from the office 10 minutes away it’s entering our neighborhood. Flying from halfway across the country, it’s about when I get in the car at the airport for the 30 minute drive home. etc.
The closest thing I have to a fixed landmark is** The Giant Chickens**.
A few miles from home there’s an old antique store in a barn & barn yard alongside what used to be a country highway and is now a freeway. It’s full of old wooden buckboard wagons, rusting 1900’s farm implements, etc. It’s a farmin’ man’s antique joint, not a lady’s store full of fussy doilies & bumpy red glassware. The ancient geezer who owns this stuff spent years gathering it all & is now spending his dotage trying unsuccessfully to sell it.
A few years ago he somehow ended up with four 12-foot-tall fiberglass chickens. They look like they belong on the roof of some 1960s fried chicken franchise. And there they sat in his yard by the roadside; a small flock of very big birds. Slowly their numbers dwindled. About 6 months ago one became none. I gotta admit I miss that last chicken.
Even now when traveling that route my wife & I still reckon our progress by the Giant Chicken(s). “Where are you? I’m almost to the Giant Chicken. OK, see you soon.”
I used to travel to Utah by car a lot for work. On the way back, as you approach Denver, there are a series of signs warning truckers of the steep grades and winding roads yet to come. Interestingly, these do not exist in the high mountains, maybe it is too obvious. I guess many truckers drop their guard as they know they are close to the flatlands, therefore the signs.
The very last one reads:
TRUCKERS YOU ARE NOT DOWN YET
ANOTHER 1 1/2 MILES OF STEEP GRADES
AND SHARP TURNS TO GO
That’s the point when I know I am 30 minutes from home. I get off at the next exit, turn north, get through Golden and then it’s a wide open Hwy. 93 to home.
I know exactly what y’all mean! For me, driving in to San Diego from Los Angeles, the San Diego county line is the first hint of home, and seeing the immense mammary domes of the San Onofre nuclear power station is a comforting and welcome sign.
A specific route - driving home to the San Francisco area from either Tahoe/Reno or Las Vegas west from I-5 in California via highway 580. This is always at night, when it’s dark. You drive through the fairly uninteresting, hilly region of the “Altamont Pass” (with the wind turbines, unseen at the late hour.) Then you come up over the hill…
Once my parents were in the car with us on a family trip and told them “we’re about to come over the hill to Livermore now, ready?”
They gasped as we crested the hill in darkness and saw the shocking, sudden, yet beautiful, flood of lights of Livermore/Dublin/Pleasanton splayed out for miles.
missred, I’m not sure just where or when you said it, but I do recall fondly that you said you enjoyed some of the threads I had started on “geography trivia” and related issues.
This thread of yours made me want to revisit some of those threads, so as an exercise in trying to locate some that might be of interest to others who have posted here, I did a vanity search on my threads that had at least 5 replies and selected these to share.
In light of the somewhat relaxed treatment of “zombie threads” these days, it might be worth the risk to reply to any that appeal to you.
At worst, I now will have a place to look for those threads without having to repeat the process:
You can’t go home again
08-14-2003, 10:07 AM
Relating to neighboring states/countries: N-S or E-W?
06-23-2005, 09:29 AM
Who’s Farthest from “big water”?
07-05-2005, 09:02 AM
A For Fun Geography Game
08-08-2005, 10:56 AM
Down/Up/Over/Out/Back/etc. in Giving Directions
08-10-2005, 03:13 PM
Microgeography Trivia
03-11-2006, 08:34 AM
Crossing Borders: Can you tell?
04-22-2006, 08:26 AM
US States Capitals Superlatives: Help build a list
04-25-2006, 01:08 PM
How far from where you live now were you born?
05-24-2006, 07:30 AM
The strangeness of boundaries
07-13-2006, 07:57 AM
“Gravity Hills” and other anomalies
07-25-2006, 11:08 AM
Geographical “Regions” = Bigger than state and/or country: What’s yours?
08-01-2006, 10:10 AM
Essentials for Your Basic Small Town (a la Western movies)
08-02-2006, 11:19 AM
How close do you live to “the coast”?
08-06-2006, 07:35 AM
Usually when Mrs. Homie and I travel by car, we’re going south. Which means via I-55.
About ~25 miles south of Springfield is a lone windmill, about the size of one of those industrial wind-farm windmills. Whenever I see that I know I’m close to home.
There’s a very similar hill when driving into Vegas on I-15 from the North. At least it was this way back in the 80s when I lived in Vegas. You’d be out driving across the solid blackness of unoccupied desert. No farm lights or anything else.
Then you’d crest a shallow rise and suddenly, there’d be all of Las Vegas spread out before you. The road was aligned so it pointed pretty much exactly at downtown, with the Strip trailing off to the left & away from you. The valley is a shallow concave bowl and you were far enough up the hillside that you were looking down on the close suburbs, then downtown & the Strip, and finally the far suburbs climbing up the far side of the bowl.
It was always a heck of a show in the clear desert air.
On another note: Flying into Vegas back in the 70s you could spot the airport (McCarran) from 50 miles out as a bright cluster of lights in the desert blackness well beyond the south edge of town. By the 80s it was getting harder to identify amongst the other scattered patches of lights in the desert. By the late 90s you found it as the dark area embedded in the ever-expanding sea of dense urban / suburban lights.
There’s some interesting stuff there.
Only on the Dope do I find fellow geography geeks. 