Can’t enjoy the scenery when you can’t see it.
Although it was an outstandingly beautiful morning in Twin Falls, ID, 15 minutes south on US 93 put me in thick fog. Visibility, at times, dropped to far less than 1/4 mile as the road rose and then fell through the fog layers.
There wasn’t much to see because of the thick fog and I had to keep focused on what was in front of me anyway. Photo includes a meat and cheese snack on the dashboard, which I bought in Starbucks to eat along the way.
Miraculously, I was able to stick to the speed limit — 70 mph — for most of my drive. The road is painfully straight in most places and there was very little other traffic.
The fog came and went pretty much all day long, finally lifting as I descended on the final stretch of US 93 before it intersects with I-15. By that time, I’d driven through rain and snow and had been stuck behind a semi with broken brake lights (and apparently broken cruise control) for about 100 miles. I was a very happy camper when I finally got around him.
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These photos and stories keep reminding me of the sheer vastness of the US compared to the UK, where I live.
We love the US and western Canada, yet when we take holidays there we keep forgetting the scale of the place.
It has a psychological effect which cannot be duplicated back here. Up on the US (Alaska) / Yukon border one spring day we drove for two hours without seeing another moving vehicle. I promise that is true. We started to worry that we might be the only survivors of a nuclear war which had missed us.
Most Americans live cheek by jowl like us, with the usual traffic snarl and struggles for parking. But go out west, out your way, there is a freedom few Europeans can imagine. I like that space, it has two sides. Fear, isolation and alienation on the one hand but on the other, the grit of challenge, self-dependency, pride in coping alone and undiluted achievements.
And a friendship made out there tends to endure over the vicarious distractions of the smart-phone era.
There is a music which finds that space, for me:
Dylan’s ‘Girl from the North Country’ and Bob Seger’s ‘Roll Me Away’ suffice as illustrations but each of us has a hundred others.
Well said. What’s funny (to me) is how many Americans wouldn’t even attempt a drive like the ones I do every year. Vast, open spaces frighten city folks. Spending the night in a nearly deserted campground, or, worse yet, on a pullout off a lonely forest road is the stuff of nightmares for some people. Yet for quite a few of us, a multi-day drive in places like this are the kind of mild adventure we yearn for. Sometimes, when I’m driving at 70 mph down a straight, flat road in a Nevada Valley, I think about pioneers making similar drive with a wagon, often walking behind it so the beasts of burden can pull more cargo. A drive I did in 3 days could easily take them three months.
What’s odd to me is how much I understand and embrace the open spaces of the American west but still have a respectful fear of the even vaster open spaces of western Canada and Alaska. 1280 miles from Washington to Arizona is easy. 3,000 miles across the northwest frontier is a whole different story.