Grew up totally gridded (Milwaukee, so you’ve also got a nice lake that’s always east of you).
But now I live on an isthmus, tilted almost exactly 45º. Always screws up my sense of where the sun is (or is going to be in an hour, if I’m trying to park in the shade).
Since I always like to know which direction is which, I’ve got my TV chair at a 45º angle, so I’m facing north… (don’t tell my wife, she’s already rolling her eyes at my other foibles).
My own neighborhood is kind of like that. It’s a fairly typical mid-century subdivision, but the street layout kind of fakes you out and makes you think they’re on a grid. But they’re actually more like gently curving arcs, forming a kind of spiderweb pattern (albeit a nice orb web to steal @california_jobcase’s description). So you’ll head north thinking the street will take you to east-west cross street X, but instead it takes you to north-south cross street Y. It starts to make sense once you realize that’s how the streets are laid out, but it tripped me up when I first moved to the neighborhood.
This is done deliberately. Making streets curve around so they don’t turn into a major thoroughfare or short cut.
And it also cuts down on speeding traffic.
As a resident in England, it makes me smile to read all these problems with grids/non-grids.
Over here we started with footpaths. Then the Saxons got fed up with wading through the mud and started paving some roads. The Romans wanted to move soldiers around fast, so they also paved roads and made them as straight as the land allowed.
After the Romans left, nobody bothered much and some ‘roads’ got wider and wider as wheeled conveyances tried to avoid the mud, so someone invented turnpikes. Put a guy in a hovel alongside the track and let him charge a toll in return for some road maintenance.
Travel was a miserably uncomfortable business and most people didn’t, but then came the railways (with the tracks @4’ 8½" apart, the same as a Roman cart) and John Macadam invented a nice smooth (and cheap) road surface material.
In the old cities, property was (and still is) based largely on the original medieval layouts and roads had to work around a layout that predated most city planning. In London, neither the Great fire in 1666 nor the Luftwaffe in the 1940s had much impact on the street pattern.
Add in a network of motorways and bypasses and you end up with a spider’s web of roads that either race you to somewhere near your destination or meander through some of the best scenery to be found anywhere.
Also, our typical suburban housing development has roots in English garden design on estates, which emphasize pseudo-naturalistic curving paths, plantings, and woodland/open land edges. (Unlike, say, typical French landscape design, which favors straight alleés).
After the Great Fire of 1666, there were actually plans to rebuild London on a grid plan with wide, straight streets; but they never came to fruition and people ended up rebuilding on more or less the same scheme as prior to the disaster. I, for one, am glad it worked out that way. The twists and curves of the London streets are charming.
Really? British roads were initially paved with Macadamia nuts?! 
It would be hilarious if Mt. Rushmore were in Canada. “Now this here, this mountain, has carved on it the faces of some old-time politicians from another country. We have no idea why.”
“And we’re too polite to ask.”
It’s OK; sooner or later that’s indeed what people will be saying.
Or they’ll be like, “here are carvings of four mythological figures - scholars disagree on exactly who they were, or what their significance was, but it is safe to assume they were some kind of objects of worship, and that this site was a holy one, used for ritual purposes”
but just imagine the creative tagging
@Babale: you’re right, that’s more likely.
Dateline 204? “Religious figures placed and detonated explosive charges bringing the stone carvings down. Leaders said graven images are not allowed per the constitution Bible.These stone figures were believed to have advocated for elevating individual rights over collective religion and were considered blasphemous.”
Has anyone tried to imagine what the US would look like if all the state borders were like Europe, defined by geographical features, with no survey-line divisions?
I guess the opposite extreme would be a country divided with straight lines, or gridded rectangles…
a country divided with straight lines, or gridded rectangles…
Just spent half an hour drawing one… started at the west coast and got as far as Lake Erie, but ran into a lot of political problems (I mean, would Oregon really give up thousands of acres just so they could have a straight border with Idaho?).
Interesting thought experiment, with some problem of not really having enough distinctive features in lots of places.
How would the border between the US and Canada have been figured?
Another is that of history, where, for example, Britain and Spain wanted to agree to the boundary between their respective claims. They agreed to a couple of straight lines for part of the boundary, which then sort of naturally wound up being used for various state lines.
Nothing unusual about straight-line borders at all. It goes back at least to 1494. (And that, kids, is why Brazilians speak Portuguese.)