When did you become interested in roads/road trips etc.?

[dariusb]

I've always loved road trips as long as I can remember. That was maybe the age of 4. Around 12 or so I became interested in highway maps and atlases. My mother bought me my first Rand McNally atlas at 13 where I further developed my map reading skills and soon began planning family road trips and was pretty much a full fledged road geek, road warrior and whatever other term you can think of, lol! Even now at 41 I still eagerly await new road atlases to see what new roads and freeways are under construction or built. That's my story, what's yours?

[Max Rockatansky]

Pretty much my entire life.  My Dad was arguably just as into this hobby as me and brought me along with him on much of his travels.  I had a small collection of maps, highway sign kits for my slot cars and a ton of other highway/car related toys.  At least in the 1980s roadgeek culture was something of a mainstream thing with my adult males in the Mid-West.  I distinctly remember my Dad telling me the history of the US Route system and why not all roads were freeways like the Interstates when I was 3. 

[Big John]

Earlier than I can remember for roadways and traffic signals.  I used to make highway plans on paper and built highways in the sandbox.  Familt did not have a car so no road trips

[wriddle082]

My parents split up when I was 6 years old in 1981 (though they remained friends and still are to this day), and my mom took my little brothers and I and moved us to her hometown of Ashland, KY, which was ~362 miles from my hometown and father's hometown of Nashville, TN.  So a good chunk of my childhood was spent traveling I-65, Bluegrass Parkway, local roads in Lexington, and I-64.  I know every turn, exit, and vista along that entire route by heart, and I could probably drive it blindfolded.  Also, my maternal grandfather (who died way too young at age 72 in 1986), turned me on to Rand McNally Road Atlases, and the KY/OH/WV Tri-State area has many impressive bridges over the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers, which always interested me.

[Rothman]

My entire life.  I used to read simple road signs when I was very, very young (so my mother says) and point out 2-way and 4-way stop signs.  Earliest road trips were from southern Indiana to eastern Kentucky when the Mountain Parkway still had tolls.  Always loved them as my parents did as well.

[Beltway]

16, when I started driving, and observed the Shirley Highway reconstruction underway in Arlington, VA.

[dlsterner]

Pretty much my whole life.  Back in the 1960's when I was about 8 years old, I was fascinated by the charts my father would make to plan our family trips, as well as the notes that were taken during the trip.  They were done on paper, being in the pre-spreadsheet (and pre home computer) era.  He showed me how to read maps and how his charts were made.

Every year he would get a new set of maps from AAA and started handing down the old ones to me.  I was hooked.

[Dougtone]

As long as I can remember, and even before then. One of my earliest memories is sitting in a 1981 Buick station wagon and being a passenger going around a ramp on a cloverleaf interchange. Apparently, I would bury my head in maps at age 3, so much that my family had to intervene and attempt to diversify my interests. Those constant trips along the Taconic State Parkway between my boyhood home on Long Island and our family's cabin near the northwest Catskills also helped.

[dgolub]

Basically as long as I can remember.  I started memorizing the street map of my town back when I was a little kid.  I remember when I was 10 years old and home sick with fifth disease, my mother got me an atlas of all 50 states, and I absolutely loved it.  I got really serious about roadgeeking as a hobby when I was in high school, after discovering Steve Anderson's web sites such as NYCRoads.com.  I started work on my site, which would become East Coast Roads, in August 2003 at age 16.

[triplemultiplex]

As a really young kid, I found freeways fascinating because we didn't have any within an hour of our tiny town.  I recall trips to Milwaukee where the route alternated between freeway and not freeway.  It's a trip that evolved a lot over my youth; MKE from the northwoods via Oshkosh & Stevens Point.  I distinctly remember asking my dad when we were going to get back to the freeway while traveling the then two-lane US 10.

It was probably about that time that I encountered my first Rand Mac.  That was cool, but by the time I was about 10, we got our first Delorme atlas of Wisconsin and then I really got into the details of everything.

By now, the road trip to and from Milwaukee always had some section of construction as US 41 started to get freeway converted and US 10 started getting four lanes.  The four lane expansion of US 51 between Merrill and Tomahawk really captivated me probably because I saw it the most.  Seeing that construction and poring over the maps, I made all the connections about what lines meant what in theses atlases and how this was part of a much larger system.

I think what really locked it in for me was the family getting updated atlases and maps and then I basically took over the old ones and started my first fictional musings.  This was middle school era for me, right in the heart of WisDOT's "Corridor's 2020" program where four lane highways were going in all over the state, so the combination of all of that hooked me even before I discovered my first roadgeek website.

That entry was provided by Kurumi's 3di articles.  It was my first taste of highway history and how things were planned and built or canceled.  Here I am a couple decades later, still in it and still spending spare moments drawing fictional ideas and debating the merits of road projects with all you people.

[Flint1979]

Probably my whole life I remember I could name every street along Bay Road in Saginaw from Court Street all the way to Freeland Road, a distance of about 7 miles or so when I was 4 years old. Then it turned to knowing all the exits on I-75 between Saginaw and downtown Detroit. Then knowing every overpass between Saginaw and Flint, I know it all the way into Oakland County now.

My travels as a kid were in my grandma's neighborhood. If you ever look at Saginaw on Google Maps or something that would be the area between Court, Cooper, Bay and Woodbridge. A pretty big area for a 5 or 6 year old to be traveling.

[ClassicHasClass]

Always liked roads, always liked driving. The photography came when I started taking pictures of BGSes as locators for other shots. Soon the BGSes became the shots.

[Max Rockatansky]

Always liked roads, always liked driving. The photography came when I started taking pictures of BGSes as locators for other shots. Soon the BGSes became the shots.

I didn't really get into the photo part until the last couple years.  I had road photos previously but they were usually just location markers more than anything else for other photo albums.  I had a pretty good mix of signs and some notable highways, nothing close to the scale that I have now.  Weird part is that I traveled way more then than I do now.

[Ned Weasel]

Ever since I started riding in a car. The more I saw, the more I noticed, and the more I noticed, the more interesting they became.

[formulanone]

A 1979 family trip from Nashville to Fort Lauderdale to visit my grandparents was the first time I'd seen a road atlas, which sparked an interest in maps, atlases, travel, and of course, automobiles.

[nexus73]

When I was all of 1 year old, I can still remember my father's 1939 Plymouth coupe. which was shiny black and kept clean as a whistle.  My mother drove a 1953 Buick Special gray/white 2 door post.  Of course if I was going to remember cars so well when that young, I also paid attention to the streets and highways they went on.  Everything from narrow dirt streets to early post war expressway was seen and noted.  Watching how my parents drove and listening to them talk about the "new highway" (101 north of North Bend was rerouted in 1953) further got my interest piqued regarding the subject of transportation.

Airplanes, ships, trains, these were also interesting but cars were #1 to me.  I still remember the DC-3 passenger planes which flew out of the North Bend airport.  My mother was good about taking us children all around the town to show us stuff while my father handled the rural routes of Coos County.  What was missed: Lots of long road trips.  My father was a truck driver who put in 12 hour days at a minimum for 6 days a week.  He did not have any time for long drives after all that work! 

Rick

[3467]

As a very small kid. We traveled a lot for business and I always wanted to know where  we were. So I was handed the road atlas. Then got interested in type of road then majored in geography.

[NWI_Irish96]

My family did a lot of long road trips when I was growing up.  Trips from Indiana to Florida and California, as well as many other shorter trips.  Before the age of electronic devices in cars, my entertainment was following our route on the Atlas.

Ever since I began driving at 16, I always tried to take a different route to places I'd been before, to the extent that time and the people with me would allow.  In essence, I was trying to clinch different highway segments without really knowing it was a thing or keeping track of it anywhere other than in my head.  Once I discovered this site and the Clinched Highway mapping site in my 30s, I put a lot more effort into tracking my travels and trying to clinch highways.

[index]

As long as I can remember. As a little kid I'd always read out every single sign I saw on the road and I was pretty fascinated by bridges and tunnels and I'd always draw maps and signs and things like that. I used to have a name for the interchange between VA SR 895 and I-95, as well as SR 195, the "magical bridges". I'd stare at atlases for hours on end and I'd always play games with road related things in them.

[DJ Particle]

Ever since I was about 4 years old.  I used to draw roads in the inside covers of my coloring books.  I used to make small towns for my die-cast cars.  I'd draw roads in the parking lot of the family business and grade roads in the playground.

Later, I'd become fascinated with maps, including older maps to see how things changed over the years.  I'd draw fictional maps and take them through time.

After I got my license in '89, I'd take hours-long road trips for the hell of it (you should have seen the look on the Canadian border guard's face when I told him my business in Canada was to "just drive around a bit").  I love taking long road trips or traveling on freeways/highways I've never been on before.  I love seeing changes in local roadways like additional freeways or (in MN) new exit numbers finally being posted.

And that 's just the tip of the iceberg 

[SectorZ]

Mine is probably from early as I can remember, traveling back and forth between Tewksbury and my grandparent's home in Wethersfield, CT. That really got me into everything road-related, especially considering how many changes occurred along the 86/84 corridor thru the 80's.

[ozarkman417]

I can't remember why I became interested in roads and cartography, but it was when I was four when I became interested.

My brother (who was as interested in trains as I was roads, but that's changed to astronomy ) and I made a model town with scale model buildings of my dad's, model train sets, hot-wheels, and hand-drawn roads made my me.

Around the same time, huge changes in Springfield area infrastructure were unfolding, including the first DDI, redoing the US 60/65 interchange, and the creation of new expressways going from Kansas City to the Ohio River Delta.

[KEVIN_224]

For me? Probably when mom started her life over and moved us tiny tots from central Connecticut to Wells, ME in 1974. Us twins were 3. My older brother was 5 going on 6 and my sister wasn't even 2 yet. It grew further with a 5th grade field trip to Boston on Thursday, June 3, 1982 (was back in central CT then). Then an old friend of my mother's had the Rand McNally Road Atlas in her car. I followed our route when then same woman took us (me and my twin) up to Litchfield County, CT and crossed the NY border. I wanted to say it was along US Route 44? The ultimate geek out for me was August 25-27, 1989. That trip added NYC, Baltimore, Washington DC, NJ, DE, MD and VA lifetime. It all "exploded" from there! (PA and Philadelphia was in March 1991.)

[silveradoman298]

I always enjoyed traveling as a kid and the routes we would take. The next time traveling these routes, I'd notice the details of how these routes would change. It wasn't until sometime in 2002 or 2003 that I came across HB Elkin's millenniumhwy website that I realized there are others out their with the same interests in roads and they are known as road enthusiasts and that it was normal for me to be interested in such things. Thanks HB!

[J3ebrules]

When I was a kid, I lived in Hoboken, NJ - right before it really gentrified. We didn't have much money, but my mother was insistent that I not become a city kid who never left their city, so we took road trips up and down the Eastern Seaboard my whole life. She had been in a nasty rear-end collision before I was born that left the backseat of her "˜82 Celica somewhere around her ears and was terrified after she had me in "˜87 that it could happen when I was back there (and restrictions on child seating  didn't really tighten up til the 90's), so I was in the front seat next to her from the very beginning, child seat or not.

I learned to read pretty young and practiced on signs - pretending to "eat"  certain signs as a game. Warning signs I'd "spit out"  as bad tasting.

When I was about 6, we went on a class field trip to the Liberty Science Center. I distinctly remember sitting up at the front of the bus and, somewhere on NJ 495, asking him if we were getting on the Turnpike to exit 14B. He and the other teacher sitting up front were floored, saying they never met a kid my age who not only took interest in how we got someplace, but also knew how to get there. Being a girl probably threw them off as well - stereotypically, you'd probably think boys would be more into transportation.

I was the map holder and the map studier, and I continue to be. I love the road - love the evolution of roads and history and what they say about the people or the times.