Well Adela & I have been travelling – not as much as some hard-core road bands – but we do our fair share. We like to take our time, wander the backroads, setting up shows that allow us to travel more of the old highway systems than the new interstates.
Did you know: North-to-south highways are odd-numbered, with lowest numbers in the east and highest numbers in the west. Similarly, west-to-east highways are even-numbered, with the lowest numbers in the north and highest numbers in the south. Major north–south routes have numbers ending in “1” while major east–west routes have numbers ending in “0”. Three-digit numbered highways are spur routes of each parent highway but are not necessarily connected to their parent route.
Now all this happened when people were driving MODEL A’s…..before 1925 or so, Auto trails existed – an informal network of marked routes that existed in the in the early part of the 20th century. Marked with colored bands on telephone poles, the trails were intended to help travellers in the early days of the automobile..
Auto trails were usually marked and sometimes maintained by organizations of private individuals. Some, such as the Lincoln Hiway in Penn, maintained by the Lincoln Highway Association, were well-known and well-organized, while others were the work of fly-by-night promoters, to the point that anyone with enough paint and the will to do so could set up a trail.
So our fellow Music Travellers, what’s your favorite route? One that takes you past some beautiful river, past small towns that glow with the patina of age? We just travelled RT 209 to rt 52 to rt 17 in Lower central New York – country the leads to the bottom of the Catskills, through towns whose heyday clings and shows its grace in boarded storefronts.
We revel is this as Americana Travellers. We’ll be putting together some film of where we’ve been and who we’ve met, we hope you’ll be interested enough to have a look.
