The American Road Experience

This is how obsessed I am with highways in the United States.

I have been running a collection of the roadways I travel on across my home state of Illinois.  Since you obviously can't pick up a road and take it to your house (plus, imaging how inconsiderate that would be), I have taken photographs of the highway signs with the route numbers on them.  Over the last ten years, I have successfully incorporated every state, federal, and Interstate highway passing through the state of Illinois into my collection.

Now, I have decided that I want to collect all 256 of the federal and Interstate highways across the United States*, plus enough signs to make 3 separate collages all the state highways from 1 to 55.  Even though there are 50 states, I also decided to throw 5 extras in there (Interstate, County, US, Ontario, and National Park/Reservation Lands) to make it a nice 11x5 array.  (Plus, Arizona didn't have any highways numbered lower than 51, so I had to figure something out.)  256 highways in the nationwide system plus three more sets of 55 brings me to 421 total road signs to collect over the years.  It's a road trip bucket list of sorts.  Currently, I have acquired 120 of the 421 signs necessary to complete my quest.  The current extent of my collection is visible here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ebnbyyv5bnpvqj0/Highways%20Dec%2014.png?dl=0

The point of all of this?  To motivate myself to further explore the vastness and beauty of the United States (plus Ontario).  Experiencing America isn't just going to the major tourist destinations-- it's getting to know the places in between them, where the natural beauty shines and where the lives of the American people take place.

I've planned a series of 14 road trips that will carry me everywhere across the U.S. and cross all of the highways I intend to collect.  I've already completed the first two.  A few of these trips are necessary to complete the collection but only contain a few of the essential signs, including trips to Alaska, Hawaii, and Lake Tahoe.  To me, grabbing the steering wheel and driving on a bold expedition to anywhere is the greatest expression of freedom I've encountered.  If you begin to feel trapped in your current life, sometimes you need to remind yourself that you can always break free.  You can get in your car and (as long as you obey traffic laws) take yourself anywhere you want to go, just to remind yourself of the freedom you have to just go anywhere.  This nation has over 300 million people, each living 300 million completely distinct lives.  That means that there are at least 300 million possibilities of where you could be and what you could be doing.  I'm doing this because I love to see that, even within one country, there are so many possibilities of what you could be, and where you could live.