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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2163 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 26, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Some Observations From a 2500 Mile Road Trip

I spent a large part of June on the American Interstate.

I decided to take an "open ended" summer vacation. What I mean by that is that I got in my Truck and drove with generally a city in mind, but with no reservations already booked or itineraries planned. I'd get to the target city or, in a few cases, decided on the fly to keep truckin' to a different city, and then book a Motel/Cheap Hotel instantly on my phone. Think "Holiday Inn Express" grade of places. Clean enough, with AC, locks on the doors that work, 24 hour person at front desk. Nothing fancy in the rooms, but they did have coffee makers.

I'd spend between one and three nights in a given city and then move on.

Here are some assorted notes on the moving on part - the driving.

  1. Drive between 150 - 200 miles at a time, then take a 10 minute break. If you do this, you can do 600 miles per day without feeling road weary. My longest day - where I was intentionally trying to set my own record - I hit 803. That was a lot and I wouldn't do it again. Trying to do a marathon push of 5+ hours behind the wheel, in my experience, creates a negative compounding tiredness.
  2. Big breakfast, snack and starve during the day. I started each day with truly epic breakfasts at the classics spots - Denny's, Waffle House, iHop. I'd leave with large ToGo cups of coffee. I was peppy and alert. Then, for the rest of the driving day, I'd eat some variety of trail mix and drink water. This kept my energy level smooth and consistent and I never got drowsy behind the wheel. I can do a bunch of caffeine in the morning but, after lunch, sodas or coffee get me feeling over-stimulated for some reason. The jitters make the drive more difficult. Dinners were only after I had checked into a hotel and were more modest the breakfast.
  3. (Staying On food) the reality really is grim for truckers. There can be lots of highway between even small cities, and its populated by gas stations and fast food outposts. The really is a dearth of semi-healthy food options. It took a lot of discipline for me not to eat a burger or hotdog each day, and I was driving without deadlines or within the context of a "job." It is easy to see how someone working under stress is going to default to the most convenient option.
  4. I don't think chronic speeding gets you to your destination faster. The naive argument of "It's speed / distance!" doesn't hold up for a number of reasons. First, once you're at 80 mph+, your effective miles per gallon plummets because of the energy needs to overcome air resistance at that speed. Depending on tank size, this can result in an extra fuel stop or two. If you aren't practicing your NASCAR team refueling process and, instead, using the bathroom, buying snacks etc. then these pit stops negate any time saved from speeding. More systemically, my observation was that traffic really does exist in "waves" even on the loneliest of highways. You may be able to speed at 80+ for some time but, eventually, you'll just run into a dozen or so cars / trucks moving in a rough "pack" closer to the speed limit. If you find something like an RV or a heavy load truck, it can be in the right lane doing below the speed limit and cause a jam up around it. You then have to fight your way through this "pack" before getting back up to speed. Much like the pit stops, this sucks back any time gains earned while speeding. Thus, my strategy was to be captain cruise control - speed limit plus 5 mph. People could pass me on the right as much as they wanted. When I passed people, I'd get back in the right lane ASAP.
  5. Silence >>>>> Podcasts > Musics. Driving without any podcast / music in the Truck was the easiest mileage I did, and I felt the best after. Still, eventually I did get a feeling of antsy-ness that would get cured with a podcast. Music I left for in town driving because I have a tendency to start hitting the skip button a lot trying to search for a "perfect" song.
  6. Drivers are truly insanely dangerous. The overestimation of ability is breathtaking. Constant tailgating and lane weaving at 70+ mph. A human simply doesn't have enough basic reaction speed to adjust on the fly at those speeds. Add in the fact that bad drivers seem to always be somewhat distracted. Death machines, each of them. I saw multiple cases of people clearly watching something on their phones while driving. One woman I passed was eating with a plastic fork and knife out of a Styrofoam food container she had balanced on the neck behind the steering while, obscuring her own dashboard. Another guy was tailgating an 18-wheeler, perhaps four feet from the truck's rear bumper, while laying on his horn. I have no idea what his intent was. According to Wikipedia motor-vehicle deaths are, if I'm reading correctly, the 2nd most common cause of accidental death in the US, behind "poisoning." As much as a car enthusiast as I am, I am beginning to think that driver training should be far, far more involved and thorough than at present, and that loss of license for repeated infractions (speeding, recklessness etc.) should be more common.

What about destination patterns? Did you enjoy any of the random cities a bit more or less than you thought?

Your music point is heard. I incur some non-trivial costs for playlist creation and maintenance, but over the past decade or so I've built up a critical mass of 1-8 hour playlist collateral I can safely just hit "Play" on in shuffle mode and fit the bill. I think it's worth doing so for a couple of your favorite artists and genres to start at least.

(I should probably turn this into a longer effortpost. We'll see)

The homogenization of America is real. Several of my destinations we're B/C tier cities. As an example; Huntsville, Alabama.

These cities are NOT in decline or blight the way the canonical Gary, Indiana or East St. Louis are. In fact, many of them have experience real population and median income growth over the last decade. Visiting them in rapid succession, however, placed in obvious relief that there is a "book" for modern small city / large down development.

Easily 50% of my conversations with locals went like this:

Me: "What's a good neighborhood for a night out? Dinner, drinks" Them: "Oh, you've GOT to go to the historic district! It's so cool. Tons of great restaurants. Go to [Insert single first name like Jimmy's or Silvia's or Tom's] they the best burger! And there's also like three really good breweries there to."

Everywhere has the best burger. There are always three to a dozen breweries "that let it dogs! and have a great trivia night!." After a few of these same places, I developed a mental formula that involved number of coffee shops with young women outside of them around lunch, number of hand-chalked signs with puns on them, and if a place had a co-working spot with a name like "the railyard" or "brick factory." If yes to all of these - congrats, you're in the "hip, revitalized" part of town.

I'm being a little flippant as this isn't a real culture war issue (or thread). But I do bemoan, to some extent, that regional variety does seem to have slipped meaningfully. I can remember growing up with a friend who had been born in Pittsburgh. He was too young to have absorbed that city, but his parents were deep "Yinzers." In our teenage years, the Dad told us drinking stories about Pittsburgh that seemed like combat to my young ears. I've since been to Pittsburgh and though you can see shadows of the "tough Iron worker" culture, it has no teeth.

Another part of me, however, kind of appreciates this. Plainly stated, more small cities are safe, workable, and viable destinations for relocation for people who want to move. Using Huntsville as an example, if you weren't from there up through the early 2000s, could you ever actually fit in after a move? Or would Alabama Southern Society culture suffocate you? If you moved to, I don't know, Buffalo NY in the 1990s and picked the wrong street, would your car get stolen? While homogenization makes places look the same, it also makes them function the same to an extent. In a nation as large and diverse (diversity is our strength!) as the US, an expectation of similar overall capability as you travel is probably a feature, not a bug.

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