So, I was watching the original Twilight Zone adaptation of the 1941 radio play, “The Hitch-hiker”, and it opens on Nan Adams having had a minor accident on US 11 in PA.
And immediately I was annoyed. This episode was aired in 1959, and, like the original, Adams was en route to LA from Manhattan. What the heck was she doing on 11?
It wouldn’t have even made sense in the original - the PA Turnpike had been built. I pulled up a 1960 road map, followed 11 for a bit from PA, noticed she was going to have a heck of a time in Tennessee where 11 wasn’t completed, and figured she should have taken the PA Turnpike to US 40 and picked up 66 in St Louis, following that the rest of the way.
Glancing back at the radio script, I noted Ron Adams’s stops (was Serling trying to say something about directions with that gender swap?) and traced his route over the “New Pennsylvania Turnpike” to Zanesville, OH to Missouri to Oklahoma to Amarillo and then New Mexico - so I was dead on the money about the “right” way to get there.
So, fellow road geeks, two questions from here.
1. How the hell did Nan Adams figure she was getting to LA from US 11? Spoilers are acceptable because the play is 79 years old and you’ve most likely either seen a version of it or read the play in eighth grade. It’s irrelevant anyway - let’s assume she’s not dead.
2. Any other examples of wtf road choices in other fiction? TV, movies, books - you name it!
And yes, I know how to spell Hitchhiker - the hyphen is used in the original, so that's why I opted for the same stylization.
Current best route from LA to NY is Interstates 15-40-81-78. It's why the truck traffic on I-81 in Virginia infuriates so many people. US 11 parallels I-81 for most of its length in Pennsylvania (Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee too, for that matter, notwithstanding the E-W split in the Volunteer State). Not sure what the preferred routing would have been back then, but if one was using existing US routes these days, why wouldn't the driver be on US 11 somewhere between the Maryland line and Harrisburg?