Whenever I do a long highway trip I can't help but notice how often I pass "one of everything". By that I mean when I'm hungry I don't have to wonder where I will eat, I know that within 10 miles I will find some exit with a few fast food chains, a fast casual restaurant, 2 gas stations, an a motel. You don't have to ask "Where is the McDonalds" you ask "Where is the NEXT McDonalds" because you know you probably are between two.
I find this tiny bit of Americana comforting. I don't know if there is another country so large that is so consistently developed. There are so few places in America where you might end up out of range of these basic comforts, despite our fairly massive landmass.
Try doing that on a north to south trip from walla walla to Las Vegas. There are still places in the USA where “next services, 150 miles” is common. I love those drives.
Me too. These are the best sort of road trips, where you still need to plan things out and when you do finally stop it's a dusty service station with a local diner next door, not another McDonalds.
Went through the SE corner of Oregon last weekend, camping on Steens mountain. It's amazingly and wonderfully empty, which isn't how I'd like to live, but is great to experience. Had lunch in Fields, Oregon (no, didn't get the milkshake, as I am not a milkshake guy).
I'm from North Dakota and the last time I drove through Wyoming, I learned very quickly that those signs are no lie. You, wildlife, and other cars is all you will see and not much of the later. ND felt packed compared to WY.
The local food places are probably better, but one small problem on a big trip can be caused by food that doesn't react will with you. Whatever their faults, most franchises are at least that consistent.
And if you have young kids, McDonalds is very useful on a road trip. Food that I can at least tolerate, is a known quantity, the kids will eat it, and they have a play area (well, not all, but a lot of them). I won't eat McD's when we're in our home city, but I really appreciate it on a trip.
Equivalent places do exist in most US towns, though they're a bit further from the highway. The cuisine doesn't change as rapidly, but there are regional differences.
Sadly, quality varies considerably. People go to the big chains because they're a known quantity. A fair number of those mom-and-pop restaurants don't make from scratch. They heat up what comes off the Sysco truck or the warehouse club. The Internet makes it a bit easier to find a restaurant with real local character, though reading the reviews is kind of an art form: they'll get a lot of praise for generic, boring food and few reviewers will recognize a gem when they find it.
The US can't match the food culture in Italy, but with a bit of knowledge you can eat well here.
I fairly regularly drive through Europe from the UK to Italy, and (along with Switzerland) Italy has the best roadside food I've ever seen in the world. Even the crappiest looking gas station has healthy and tasty food!
This has improved a lot even since the 80s. I remember road trips as a kid and the difficulty of finding vacant lodging. Now, there are groupings of multiple large hotel chains with vacancy at least every couple hours, even in relatively remote parts of the country.
Having driven across the US a number of times, I think the last product this isn’t true for is good quality coffee. There are still parts of America where you can travel several hundred miles without seeing a single standalone Starbucks.
Pack your own coffee for long trips. Cold brew is far easier to do than you might expect.
Mix ground coffee with lukewarm water in a 1:4 ratio and let it sit for 12 to 24 hours. This creates "coffee concentrate". Mix the concentrate 1:4 with water to make your final coffee. (Tweak final ratio to taste: these ratios are set to my personal taste)
Even if you use cheap no-name coffee from grocery stores, the coffee tastes great. Grinding your own beans will result in fresher coffee.
The purpose of "concentrate" is that "concentrate" cold brew is easier to process (less to filter), and easier to store. You can pick up bottled water virtually anywhere in the USA. So carrying around the concentrate is easier.
You can also do cool things with concentrate: like make espresso (add milk instead of water), or "impromptu hot-brew" (boil some water, add the concentrate. Since you have 4:1 hot water to concentrate, your temperature will be 80% of the hot temperature).
With 4:1 final mixing ratio, a quart of concentrate becomes 1.25 gallons of coffee, more than enough for most trips.
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"Ball" mason jars are pretty universal in the USA. I'm pretty sure they're sold everywhere (more common than quality coffee at least, lol). So you shouldn't have any issues getting mason-jar equipment for storing liquids.
Just don't use their leaky white-plastic caps. Use their gray "leak proof" caps or their steel-caps if you actually want a liquid-tight seal.
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Alternatively, drink McDonalds coffee. Its actually not bad. I know plenty of foodies who avoid McDonalds EXCEPT for their coffee.
I'd agree with that, but with the additional comment that it depends on your region of the country. In some area's it's not just "actually not bad", I'd assert "very good". McDonald's often customizes it's menu to the local region. In New England, McDonald's serves Newman's Own coffee, which I quite enjoyed. At least, they did when I lived there a decade ago - who knows now.
In fairness, there probably is good coffee out there, you just don't have the mental shortcut of being able to depend on the Starbucks brand. I suppose this was the problem that Yelp, Foursquare, and friends tried to solve, but we're still not really there— even as a conscientious person who would on balance prefer to support a local, non-chain business, it's still a lot of effort to look up which one to go to.
For anyone not willing to put in that effort (or just take a risk), forget about it— that person will just stay on the highway and wait out the next Starbucks.
I'm pretty dedicated to coffee (i'd probably drive 15 minutes each way out of the way on a road trip for decent coffee), and will yelp / google aggressively if i'm the passenger.
Parent is right, there are still huge stretches with neither starbucks nor indie shops of any quality, and not just in the empty bits out west.
Maybe it's because I don't have a very high opinion of Starbucks, but there's a surprising number of those little drive-thru coffee hut things (not sure what you call them) that beat the pants off of Starbucks. Just finished up a road trip the other day that took me through the "empty bits out west" (Wyoming, Montana, Nevada), and I hit up at least 3 of them.
Love the espresso shacks! In addition to having very proper coffee, they are also great sources of local information if you need it. I am always astonished at how well-distributed and ubiquitous they are even in the very rural West. Every country road far off the beaten path with any sort of local traffic at all seems to have (at least) one. It is a neat bit of rural West culture.
I've always wondered about the economics of espresso shacks. Obviously the fixed costs are very low, a literal shack and bit of nigh worthless rural land. Each one appears to be a unique and creative local business with no underlying corporate chain tying them all together but the sheer pervasiveness of them makes me wonder if there is a well-oiled corporate business model underneath it all.
They originated in the rural Pacific Northwest, because coffee culture isn't just in the city there, but they've spread across the northern half of the Mountain West. This is a very regional bit of Americana, most Americans aren't familiar with it unless they've driven through the backwaters of that part of the country. Sometimes they are truly out in the middle of nowhere on county roads in the wilderness and such, no other buildings for miles, the novelty of which delights people the first time they see it. Small rural towns usually have multiple espresso shacks.
The coffee is legitimately very good in my experience. It is common in that part of the US to drink coffee with neither milk nor sugar.
Here is nice blog about them with a ton of pictures:
This is so interesting. I live in Beaverton, OR, and grew up and often visit Eastern Washington. These coffee shacks are everywhere. I had no idea they were a regional thing. I always assumed they were a national thing since I see them everywhere I visit for the most part. Wild.
Looks like there's a lot of crossover with the "bikini barista" concept, which I could picture being off-putting to some. I guess that's another plus for a national chain— your morning coffee isn't going to turn out to be something embarrassing to have to explain to the kids in the back seat.
The Pacific Northwest espresso shacks have no relationship to "bikini barista" places. Or at least, I've never seen a bikini in one anywhere. These are rural places staffed by locals for the locals, often teenagers.
I think it's really the northwest. Oregon has em, but driving from the bay area to LA I never saw one in rural parts of central california. They might exist though.
Problem is, if I'm low on decision making energy or risk tolerance I will prefer a near-guaranteed acceptable solution over a probably good but potentially awful one.
I was put off of these because, the first time I saw them (in Washington state), they were advertised as “bikini” coffee shacks. I had a visceral reaction to this—it felt both creepy (What kind of person would work in such a place? What kind of person patronizes it?) and gross (non-zero probability of pubic hairs in the drink). I think strip clubs are problematic too, but they seem somehow more honest and less creepy because of their transparent purpose.
I’ve heard from others that these places have good coffee, but, perhaps unfairly, I am repulsed by them.
As a big tea drinker, my solution to this when I've been on long road trips has been to use a car-outlet-powered water boiler (the coil kind). You can get them on Amazon for under $10 and they work alright. Though it's hard to do without a passenger unless you're willing to pull over and wait 10 minutes for the water to boil. And where I've driven (up the 15 from Los Angeles to Montana), there are somewhat-frequent Starbucks, though I like my own tea better.
When I’m traveling between destinations on a long trip, it’s non-trivial to find something local. Unless it’s well-advertised on billboards or close to an exit, I’m not going to find it, and I’m more interested in speed than quality.
And browsing Yelp while driving is, well, not ideal.
I love local dives, but laughing at someone for having different priorities on a long trip is rude.
I think the culture of generic chains is what makes most of the food in Middle America so bad, and most small local places would be better than MCD. (Also, I am not talking about the coasts, they don't have that problem).
I suppose it literally "could be only be one place", but it looks almost identical to thousands of small towns across the US. My entire childhood roadtrip experience was up and down the west coast on I-5, and you could absolutely convince me this was somewhere like Grant's Pass, OR, if not for the signs with PA route information on them. You'd have to convince me a chain or two (Perkins, Sunoco) expanded westward in the past few years, but that wouldn't take much doing.
I still don't quite follow this line:
> "highway planners designed a looping interchange that lets drivers avoid the turnpike if they (hypothetically) want to"
That seems no different from any other exit (you could hypothetically avoid any toll road by exiting and stopping and just staying wherever you are), but I guess the actual 'bypass' function of this road in the real world is less important than what it's come to be.
Yeah I can't agree with the author in saying that its "uniquely" Breezewood; this could be a picture of pretty much any "exit directly off the interstate" in especially the midwest, though likely around most of America. Towns like this pop up around interstates; it seems like interstates are planned to go near smaller towns, but not through them, so the town "creeps" over to the interstate and you end up with all the new developments happening over there, like big chain restaurants. And, of course, gas stations, because that just makes sense. I could point to three dozen towns between Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee that are like this.
I can confirm that this also looks like many places in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Less so, but also in Washington and Oregon.
The photo (mainly due to use of the telephoto lens) provides a sort of dense charicature, but the overall look can be found in lots of places. Not the most beautiful aspect of the US, but a reasonable one. We're a huge, sparsely populated country where many people still get around by way of long driving trips. If you've been on the road for eight hours and you and the kids are hangry, often you want some gas and a reliable, safe, familiar meal. Gas stations and fast food chains provide that.
Criticizing these photos is a bit like criticizing a landfill or sewage treatment plant as reflecting on the beauty of an entire area. It's essentially utilitarian infrastructure. It's ugly, sure, but you can't have everything be ivy-covered brick and artisanal bakeries.
Highwayland is the America that connects the other Americas together. It spans the entire continent by itself, but everywhere else is only a short drive from it. No one lives there, but everybody passes through. The interstate highway system didn't create Highwayland, but homogenized and unified it.
Everyone is a little bit comfortable in Highwayland, but also a little bit bored. It has McDonald's, Subway, Taco Bell, a Cracker Barrel, a 4-story 1-corridor hotel with indoor pool and fitness center that offers free copies of USA today in the lobby, a 2-story discount motel where the room doors open to the parking lot, the dine-in restaurant open from 6 to 10, two gas stations or truck stops across the road from each other, each with their own bustling convenience stores that sell sausages, egg rolls, and round tacos that cook on the hot dog roller, with 128-oz fountain drinks, all for $4.
If it were too interesting, people wouldn't want to leave, and the transit dimension would clog up with loiterers and squatters.
You can take a photo of Highwayland from anywhere in Highwayland, and see all the same features, but you can also strike out in a random direction from Highwayland, travel 15 minutes, and find a place unlike anywhere else on Earth, with its own local character that is instantly identifiable to anyone that has ever been there.
Sometimes the local character is strong enough to overwhelm Highwayland, just for a few miles (Highwayland abhors kilometers), and the uniqueness seeps in. Maybe you can see the city skyline, or a university campus, or a hospital. It doesn't happen often, though. Highwayland craves sameness. Mostly, it is the realm of the consistent, the predictable, and the reliable.
> Criticizing these photos is a bit like criticizing a landfill or sewage treatment plant as reflecting on the beauty of an entire area. It's essentially utilitarian infrastructure. It's ugly, sure, but you can't have everything be ivy-covered brick and artisanal bakeries.
Does it really have to be so ugly to be functional? This isn't some out of the way piece of infrastructure, these are areas of high traffic density and it is not unreasonable to ask why aesthetic considerations are so universally ignored in these types of areas in this country.
I asked the same thing about the engineering offices where I worked, and found that the reason why was because the offices didn't matter much for the people in them- we move around a lot, and the only time you're in an office is when you're figuring something out in CAD or the like. The people who work all day long in offices understandably have better furniture- we just don't need all that much.
People- interactions- matter more than places do- the happiest family I've ever met lived in a poorer neighborhood and their house was obviously not doing well.
One of the major design objectives of the Eisenhower freeway system was to eliminate the need for freeway drivers to slow down and stop due to towns - it created freeways as "protected" roads. In cities, this often meant expanding or cutting new rights of way for the freeway, often by demolishing homes, a process that was expensive and politically unpopular (and, as we understand much more now than back then, extremely destructive to those areas). In smaller towns, though, it was often easier to just curve the freeway right around the outside of the town, putting it through undeveloped land.
This had its own consequences, which you can see rather clearly in many smaller Western towns that formerly sat on a US Highway. The road through town which served as the highway spawned a great number of restaurants, gas stations, and especially motels. When a freeway was built along the same route as the US highway, it departed the old highway route before and after the town in a curving 'bypass.'
The result was that the businesses in town lost their large pool of customers passing through, and often relocated or went out of business. This manifests throughout the west as a blight of abandoned and run-down motels doomed by the freeway system. You can often see this pattern in cities as well as smaller towns (e.g. Central Ave/historic US 66 in Albuquerque, Powell Blvd/US 26 in Portland). The bypassed highway sections were often, but not always, later signed a "business loops" of the freeway (fwy number on 'transparent' or green freeway shield), a designation which promised that following the road straight on would put you back onto the freeway reasonably promptly, but this did little to help the problem.
And so, new businesses formed along the immediate exit of the freeway, which was at the outskirts of the town since the freeway was placed far enough out to obtain an unimpeded right of way. This has contributed significantly to the loss of the historic cores of towns and even cities, as well as reduced the economic vitality of many of these "truck stop towns."
To a large extent, the freeway system created the modern American roadside stop. But, at the same time, it destroyed a different version of the roadside stop that had thrived before it. Just like the US highways had before it, and the railroads before that, right back to Puebloan trade routes in these parts.
The beginning of that paragraph explains exactly why (regardless of it's sanity) they did this:
>Breezewood is a deliberately awkward transition between Interstate 70 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, where they (almost) meet. Back in the 1950s, as I-70 was being built, a law prohibited spending federal funds to channel drivers directly from a free road to a toll road. The law was later overturned, but to comply with it, highway planners designed a looping interchange that lets drivers avoid the turnpike if they (hypothetically) want to.
More detail from Wikipedia:
>I-70 uses a surface road (part of US 30) with at-grade intersections to connect the freeway heading south to Hancock, Maryland with the ramp to I-76, which through this section is the Pennsylvania Turnpike toll road. According to the Federal Highway Administration the peculiar arrangement at Breezewood resulted because at the time I-70's toll-free segment was built, the state did not qualify for federal funds under the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 to build a direct interchange, unless it agreed to cease collecting tolls on the Turnpike once the construction bonds were retired;[11] a direct interchange would have meant that a westbound driver on I-70 could not choose between the toll route and a free alternative, but would be forced to enter the Turnpike. However, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission was not willing to build the interchange with its own funds, due to the expected decrease in revenue once Interstate 80 was completed through the state.[11] Accordingly, the state chose to build the unusual Breezewood arrangement in lieu of a direct interchange, thus qualifying for federal funds because this arrangement gave drivers the option of continuing on the untolled US 30.[11]
I totally disagree. One can argue that free federal highways are problematic (car/truck and oil-dependent transportation), but given they exist, it is totally logical and consistent to not allow funneling drivers onto toll-roads. Otherwise, states and corporate entities would build toll roads in strategic locations to capture the highway traffic in a way that makes it difficult to avoid. Then the money spent on free highways is not effective, because the toll roads capture the travel budgets and reduce the usage and utility of the free-to-use highways.
If that law didn't exist at the time, I could totally see local politicians and their federal representatives colluding to put revenue-generating toll road segments into the federal highways. I'm not sure why the law was later removed, but maybe once a critical network of free roads was established, it made sense to allow toll road connections for other local highways the feds didn't want to pay for.
The "avoid the turnpike" part refers to the fact that the segment of road in the picture, which has to be traversed to get from the turnpike to I-70 or vice versa, is actually US Route 30, so hypothetically someone coming off I-70 could just stay on that route instead of being "forced" to get onto the turnpike. There are a couple of other interchanges on the PA turnpike that work similarly: the one with I-79 north of Pittsburgh (US 19 is in between) and the one with I-81 at Carlisle (US 11 is in between).
Most freeway interchanges between toll and non-toll highways don't work like that; you just go straight from one to the other.
When I first passed through this place due to work, driving from one work location to another, I stayed the night because I could and "was allowed" [by the job] to break up the drive. It was a nice demarcation; some catching-up on "The Shield" was had.
As jobs and life moved on, since I have some extended family and friends around the Portland area, Grant's Pass remained a demarcation but in different respects: as a boarder-crossing signal, as a sign-post, as a pit-stop as needed whilst I just kept going "straight on 'til morning" [I preferred one long drive back then, can't be sure now for reasons].
I cannot tell you anything particularly special about Grant's Pass other than "it's near the border" and "I-5 goes through it". No offence intended to people living there.
It is different in that I-70 ends at a traffic light, then technically continues onto what's essentially a regular four lane road before you have to make a turn onto a (very) long onramp to join the PA Turnpike (and I-76).
Grants pass actually has people living there (the only time I visited was to pick up my aunt and take her back to Seattle for some reason), it isn’t just a rest stop on I5.
Sure; I just picked it randomly as one of a number of childhood stops we made. We usually broke up our Seattle <-> Fresno drive into 12 hour and 6 hour segments, one each day.
Going south, we'd usually stay in Red Bluff of Redding; going north, Grant's Pass or Roseburg. And, regardless of need for accommodation for the night, these towns (and many others, but these are the largest I remember) offered ample fuel and fast food options.
I disagree, i have lived in or driven across a lot of the US, and I instantly recognized these pics as Breezewood when they started making the rounds lately.
Pennsylvania Highway Interchange Popular Among Web Users as Symbol of American Homogeneity
Due to a quirk of a now-defuct law causing an abundance of low speed traffic, an unusually dense set of typical off-interstate chain stores and restaurants sprung up around a Breezewood, PA interstate exit. This location has become popular among Web users for creating photos embodying the homogeneity and cultural sterility of such places.
There, headline and first couple sentences of a non-clickbait article for you.
If you read the article, you'd discover that it's not unusually dense. The photographer in question, Edward Burtynsky, spent three days finding the right location. He rented a scissor lift and shot from several stories up, with a zoom lens, giving an impression of density you can't see from the ground.
That's a good example of how the lies of art can create a greater truth. It's rare to see all the big corporate logos superimposed on different parts of the field of view, rather like the sponsorship patches on the jacket of a NASCAR driver, but it speaks to a real experience of one gas station, diner or fast food place after another that is encountered across interstate America.
I love this photo because to me it represents a sort of "American Gothic". I've spent most of my life in America and I can confirm that, as many of the linked tweets say, it does look like that "most of the time." The Breezewood rest stop is exceptional in that it is the platonic ideal: it looks far more like everywhere than anywhere. You don't have to have been there to have been there.
As a person who grew up in Washington DC with most of my family in Chicago, I have many, many, many memories of sitting in awful traffic going through Breezewood.
With that said I think the central premise of this article is mostly false. There are a lot of places in the US, typically at major interstate highway junctions, that look exactly like this.
For people who haven't dealt with Breezewood traffic, it can mean sitting in the right lane of the Pennsylvania Turnpike for a mile of stop-and-go traffic (while the left lane is going 60mph!) and spending an hour to actually make it the short gap to get back onto I-70. Trying to cross US-30 to hit your favorite establishment is not worth it--if it's not on the right side of the road, don't bother.
What doesn't help is that the PA Turnpike is pretty stingy with its rest stops, especially in the western half of the state. Most states have rest stops at about a 30mi cadence, but you've got ~70mi from the last rest stop in PA to the OH border and closer to ~50mi cadence--assuming the rest stops aren't closed for reconstruction. So even those rest stops are pretty crowded, to the point where you can have the driver get in line for gas and everyone else go to the bathroom, wait in a line that stretches out the door, and still get back to the car before it reaches the pump.
Yep, people saying Breezewood isn't special probably haven't been there. The experience isn't something you can really derive from looking at any picture. I've driven across America numerous times, been to more rest stops and exit towns than I could ever remember. Breezewood is a uniquely frustrating experience.
Yes. I DESPISE THAT PLACE. Nothing like adding an hour of stop & go traffic to a 12 hr drive. Out of principle i don't buy ANYTHING there. I'd rather break down on a "Deliverance" Pennsylvania rd @ midnight while going around it-- yes, that happened.
I too have hit many traffic jams in Breezewood. I purposely don't stop there any more as I don't want to reward them for lobbying against a real interchange.
This is one of only a handful of locations in the US where a highway travels along regular roads. I've heard though the state has finally approved funding for an interchange to be done by 2025 (last I heard).
I was kind of hoping that the article was about to analyze all the various brands pictured and show that there was precisely one place in the US where their locations all overlapped.
As it is... it's just a somewhat incoherent conclusion. "It could only be Breezewood, because I say so". Ignoring the whole purpose of the meme.
I don't think there are a lot. For the PA turnpike, there is only one other interchange like this left in Middlesex, PA at I-76/I-81/US 11, with another near Philly being fixed. And even then it is a much more built-up 4-lane section of US 11
One would hope that the highway planners were smart enough to insist on having the number of lanes that would be required to go from interstate speed traffic to city boulevard speed traffic without necessarily backing up the freeway similar to why there's so many lanes at toll booths but of course they did not.
Well to be fair... They were limited by what they were allowed to do. Normally they just build a highway interchange and call it a day. But Breezewood lobbies against it.
The meme is definitely oversized - Breezewood is pretty small. If you feel this is somehow representative of America then you must have been asleep through the vast miles of farmland and wooded hills leading up to it and stretching forever beyond it.
It makes sense if one focuses on human constructed attractions, especially if one is confined to major travel routes with the goal of getting to a destination.
I think part of what makes this photo look unique to many is that Pennsylvania sits between the extremes of the Northeast's planned rest stops, and the Midwest's natural four-corners ones - so it's exceptional from both. It's larger than one standard concrete building with pluggable vendors, and it's denser than fuel stops with truck scales, overnight parking, etc. Pennsylvania also has this hilly thing going on that tends to concentrate, hide, and focus business gatherings.
Travelling across the country, the real depressing pattern is McDonalds ahead 10 miles, ... 5 miles, ... 2 miles, ... 1 mile, .... half mile, "turn around you missed McDonalds!", next McDonalds 36 miles, repeat. I believe the bigger rest stops actually break the homogeneity by offering more variety. But on longer distances, one actually comes to see the value in chains - predictability. And I say this as someone who goes out of my way to avoid chains.
Of course that's all still focused on the commercial infrastructure that supports travelers. If you're roadtripping, especially west of Pennsylvania (ie clear of the Megalopolis), and not basking in the novel landscape, you're doing it wrong.
In Pennsylvania ("Penn's Woods") the under-developed landscape still towers so gigantically above the developed landscape that I wonder what people think they are seeing during travel. Of course, things pop up to serve the travelers along the highway, so the from-the-highway view is not truly typical, but still. The developed landscape seems all that is considered.
But I see a Pennsylvania that is vast and filled with forest.
landscapes change as you drive across the country, but no matter the landscape, you are never far from a cacophony of corporate iconography packed into a little strip mall nestled at the bottom of an otherwise-disused exit ramp. it's one part of America that nearly everybody has interacted with directly.
Huh...I stop at that exact spot. A lot. Mostly because it's a good spot to fuel up before (as I do) one disappears for 50 miles onto PA back roads (and 50 miles back...) with no more gas stations. I never realized it was 'a thing', but it _is_ a decent place to stop.
To me this seems like taking a photo of a sausage factory and saying: This is what Italian food is like.
Err... yes. It's the worst part of the food creation process. Ugly and brutal.
This is a big part of America. The highway systems and the towns and businesses that support it.
Like sausage making is to Italian food. But I feel that seeing this and saying 'this is it', is unfairly failing to see the larger whole. This is the method that allows American's to travel anywhere within their country in a super efficient way that other countries can only dream of. Where I'm originally from, if you can plot a 100 mile line from where I was to some destination I wanted to go, it was a 200 mile road trip that would take 7-8 hours. Here in America, most destinations within a 100 mile radius take a 120~ mile drive which will take under 2 hours. I have explored a ton of places in this country because of the ease of moving around. The sausage factory sucks, but I do love sausage.
I randomly ran into an old high school friend at a gas station in Breezewood. We were living 2000 miles apart at the time and were traveling in separate directions and just happened to meet. A few years later, in his late 30s, he contracted skin cancer and died, and that chance meeting in Breezewood was the last time I saw him.
I've been through Breezewood hundreds of times. The tagline on old postcards used to be: "Breezewood, The Town of Motels". Though, there seems to be fewer now than I remember.
It's effectively a supersized rest-stop consisting of a drag of fast-food chains, motels and gas stations. The article is right, and it's pretty unmistakable if you've been there before. Yeah, depending on your point of view it's a hyperreal mash-up of everything that's wrong in the American urban landscape.
There really is nothing to do there other than pee or get gas.
If you are up that way and want to stop somewhere interesting that's nearby...
Bedford PA (http://www.downtownbedford.com/) -- has a charming historic "mainstreet" with interesting shops, restaurants and festivals.
Bedford Springs Resort (not far from Bedford), is posh old hotel with superb spa with natural spring water and access to some really good hiking. Sort of like that hotel in "The Shining", except without horror. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omni_Bedford_Springs_Resort)
If you want the almost exact opposite of Breezewood visit Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I tell people it's like time travelling back to the fifties. I can remember when there wasn't a single fast food restaurant up there.
Even today it's been voted the most McUnderEndowed area in the United States.
I’ve probably traveled through Breezewood a few hundred times over the decades. What’s strange to me is that it never seems to change. The photo from 2008 looks pretty much the same as now. And, it looked pretty much the same in 1990. With all that traffic, why isn’t there more there?
Well, a lot of the restaurants are closed too. I think it can only handle so many truck stops and restaurants. It is also largely in the middle of nowhere so I don't the traffic is increasing in any material way.
Odd, I pass through multiple times a year and the changes have been obvious; a good chunk of the businesses highlighted in that shot are actually closed, now.
Reminds me of Stephen Shore's 1975 photograph of La Brea and Beverly (https://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12...). Lots of photographers have done commentary on this American landscape. Some of my favorites include Anthony Hernandez, Robert Adams, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel. Robert Adams' "Summer Nights Walking" feels like strolling through any of these small American towns late at night.
I stopped at this exit a dozen times at least. I am genuinely surprised that I have as many distinct memories as I do about a meme about banal American suburbia. I, wildly unsuccessful, tried to flirt with a college crush in that gateway. I got a shitty sub from that quiznos. I was grumpy when I got woken up from a car nap here.
I hate suburbia more than most, but I have alot of memories from this meme of plastic America.
Is this landscape really as unique as the article wants to portray?
I’ve been to the US for short trips, Norwalk - CT, Miami, NYC, nothing special about these places but from what I recall you could easily take a similar picture: Chipotle, Macdonalds, Walmart, Subway, Gas stations all lined up in a short stretch of road.
I grew up a few hours from Breezewood and we frequently stopped there for food and restrooms on school field trips. Probably looks the same now as it did then
It seems to me this entire piece is solely based around the idea that because something a picture of sold for a lot of money can't be ordinary and mundane. I'm sorry, but it is. It's a cookie cutter of which there are thousands. The whole piece left me with somewhat of a condescending "holier than thou" vibe which simply looks like a lot of demagogy. How dare we, ignorant peons make something into a meme that was supposed to be a deep exploratory art narrative on the subject of contemporary culture? Eh, thanks but no thanks.
I find this tiny bit of Americana comforting. I don't know if there is another country so large that is so consistently developed. There are so few places in America where you might end up out of range of these basic comforts, despite our fairly massive landmass.