I found this in “my archives” during the Michigan visit:

The Yes M!ch!gan Map!

Oh, I remember when soft drinks used to come with maps. I remember a couple weeks ago, sundown in the deep south, when my Verizon Wireless Navigator was bugging out on us and we had to use last years atlas to get us back on the highway.

In case you haven’t caught some of my previous posts - I love maps. I love maps of malls, museums, battlegrounds, college campuses, and airports. I have a habit of saving them and it makes for a cluttered life. I would scan and put them in digital storage but you know how small scanner beds are and how big maps can be.

This has been a lifelong interest and I find that like wine, maps get better with age. Think old globes, think USSR, think colonialism.

I like the idea that something we see as a factual reference document can turn to a piece of radical disinformation in a matter of years.

Just look at THIS MAP JACKPOT OF A SITE  and see how people used to think California was an island. I think we may rediscover that they were right in 2012.

What I really like is to combine my map obsession with my commitment to snail mail so I am always on the lookout for postcard maps. I found this postcard at a BP in Indiana recently:

Apparently it is from The Hoosier Heritage Quilt. I found that out at Indiana University’s Historic Maps of Indiana Site.  Cool, huh?

I guess you have to be a map nerd.

I plan on making a camera, a front car bumper camera that captures the events of the low road at 192 frames per second. So that the next time I drive from Michigan to Tennessee or from Tennessee to Michigan I will have visual documentation of the distinct variations in road kill along that particular North/South route. Michigan deer is far messier (I drove over fifty yards of entrails and blood coming up I-69 near Coldwater and then encountered four other blood-splattered sections before Lansing) than Arkansas armadillos (they just hang out on the side of the road stiff, like footballs with claws, moving only if caught by the wind of an eighteen-wheeler) but both are alluring animals- dead or alive.

I’d like to have a camera covering the low road because I pretty much have the high road under control. I am able to take pictures, text, administer eye drops, and sharpen pencils while driving.

I was in Northern Indiana by the time the sun started to come up and turn Muncie into a setting straight out of a Dutch landscape (or an Enya CD cover):

There is no other way to see the midwest farm country. I know this because I grew up there and all the farmers got up early not just because it is a good time to milk cows but because it looks cool.

And it is all about looks in the end. It was a little over a year ago in Badwater Basin when Bethany and I discovered our true vocational calling, capturing sunsets in our hearts. Sunrises are sunsets somewhere so these count too:

Roadkill to hippy in one entry. I’m available for your next dinner party.

Fowlerville. The north view looks strikingly similar.

…look about you.

Made it to Fowlerville very late last night. What pleasure to drive out from under the trees of Midtown Memphis, through the sunflowers of east Arkansas and the purpled-flowered brush of lower Missouri and the pro-life signage of southern Illinois – punctuated by a forty-foot cross in Effingham (a rather funny name for a place with a huge cross– that is if people are pronouncing it like I am; EFF-in’HAM) and then a ramble onward through the flat gray roads of the only interstate highway system in the USA that has more Arby’s than McDonalds – Indiana, all just to be greeted by my favorite state sign of all time MICHIGAN: GREAT LAKES GREAT TIMES. Every time I drive under it I think, no DUH.

(photo from Arkansas)

I’ll be back in the Volunteer State soon. Until then…