Thursday, December 25, 2008

MERRY CHRISTMAS from TheRoadGeek.com

... and a Happy 2009!

Monday, December 22, 2008

Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West (Culture Trails)


Spiral Jetta is not your everyday family road trip book. It’s more of a journal of a college age woman using a road trip home to visit some larger than life art along the way. The title is a clever combination of Spiral Jetty and Volkswagen Jetta. Her car is the Jetta. The Spiral Jetty is one of her stops along the way, a monumental earthwork near Utah’s Salt Lake. Author Erin Hogan journals her trip in a way that draws you along with her. Not too many “road geeky” travelogue items here. It’s the people she meets, the colorful places she meets them and the trouble of finding oversized art with poor directions and a car not made for back roads. You may even learn about art along the way to Sun Tunnels, Lightning Field, Roden Crater and Double Negative. Bring along a soda. It’s mighty dry in Texas, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona.

Links
Buy the book, Spiral Jetta
Sun Tunnels
Lightning Field
Roden Crater
Double Negative

Sunday, November 30, 2008

A Sign of Interest to Road Geeks

If this ain't road-geeky, I don't know what is. While traveling along Oregon 99W, I noticed they had not used the Oregon Highway Shield on a street sign in Tigard, Oregon. I appreciate that they were trying to give it a classic look, but they used the Interstate Highway shield outline. 99W is not an Interstate Highway, although it was former US Route 99W and some say Alt US 99.



Those poor sign makers always getting picked on by Road Geeks!!

US 99W in Oregon stretched from just south of the Interstate Bridge north of Portland to Junction City, Oregon. 99W and 99E mostly follow the Willamette River Valley. Both ends merged with US 99E and continued as US 99. Oregon 99W is now signed only from downtown Portland to Junction City. You can easily follow the old 99W by crossing the Steel Bridge and then following Interstate Avenue until it merges with I-5 and shortly into Washington State across the Interstate Bridge over the Columbia River. A section of the old 99W through downtown Portland is now the Tom McCall Waterfront Park. This road along the Willamette River was considered a hideous freeway and was not just decommissioned, but totally destructed.

The City of Portland put to good use the former 4 lanes of Interstate Avenue and laid tracks for an expansion of the Max light rail transit system. There is still 2 lanes you can enjoy along with the tracks.
South of the Portland Metro area, 99W travels through scenic rural country, small towns, wine country. I-5 replaced both 99W and 99E with almost a whole new alignment, so 99W is mostly locked in time with at grade crossings, stoplights, and some slow speed limits through towns. While you are enjoying the scenery, look out for the other guy who is probably also distracted by the scenery. Be aware that 99W can be very very slow north of Tigard.

Photos (c) 2008 All the World Travel

Links
more on the 99W freeway

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Friday, November 28, 2008

I am a Road Geek

I love checking out roads... old roads, new roads, even roads that aren't there any more.