Last night, I had dinner at a restaurant in San Francisco (Maverick). Underneath the dessert plate was a card that was very clearly a black-and-white scan of part of the Yellow Book Interstate Highway numbering from 1957. (I recognized it from the typefaces, and the numbers in circles.) The waitress didn't know anything about it.
Where have you found items of roadgeek significance unexpectedly?
There is a restaurant in Hamilton, ON, that has a stylized mural of the 427 with express and collector lanes on one of their walls.
This isn't exactly the same type of thing, but several years ago I was at a flea market in Branson, MO and I found some old road maps for sale-not the type of thing I was expecting to find at a flea market. It was just a group of old official free state highway maps and purchased maps together in one package. I would have bought them except I thought the price was too high. They were old maps, but they weren't that old(70s and 80s era) and not really worth the price on them.
This is mounted on the wall at the Lime Restaurant on CT 123 in Norwalk:
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FAKh9G.jpg&hash=c46a926f1b5f4b99e89b5941704987ddc7cd3c28)
It's about 6 inches wide, 4 tall, and 2 deep.
The manager believes it was a first-aid kit brought along by engineers or workers in the field.
I attended a spaghetti dinner fundraiser at the Ottawa Sportsman's Club on M-38 west of Baraga earlier this summer. The clubhouse has 1926-vintage embossed M-28 and M-35 markers on the wall as decoration, with a 1968—70s-vintage flat M-38 cutout marker. What's cool is that the highway the club is on was M-35 until 1968, and it's been M-38 since.
Wow, I haven't posted since June 4th! I'd started some posts about a roadtrip I took on July 3rd, but never finished them. I'll get to it eventually.
Anyway, this is on the front page of Imgur right now, taken about 50 miles away from me:
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FuMevZ.jpg&hash=d323862e556ef65f91dc081c32c370432d7ae65a) (http://imgur.com/uMevZ)
(Click the picture for the Imgur page)
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Ffarm5.staticflickr.com%2F4101%2F4734987589_b8be42a920_d.jpg&hash=b94adb29aca547ca1488e0f9a7d4c7b2a56583e0)
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Ffarm5.staticflickr.com%2F4135%2F4734987527_055f8fb607_d.jpg&hash=ed8f84bc754fb84c7652b5b08a7c22ad2b4113d6)
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Ffarm5.staticflickr.com%2F4098%2F4735624960_f9abb4bc2d_d.jpg&hash=938ece43616ff7cd853f4d2f11e567daee03f383)
Pizza by Stout Joplin, MO
(lost 5-22-11)
These faux freeway signs are on the Backlot Stunt Coaster at Kings Island:
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Ffarm9.staticflickr.com%2F8446%2F7871285418_61588d3da0_c.jpg&hash=69b8fe83dcfb411741578bc90ba97b49313468ca)
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Ffarm9.staticflickr.com%2F8306%2F7871289818_748741e36a_c.jpg&hash=cc39cc25050468507dbeaa43032b5589f11e3b5e)
There's another one that has an equally ugly US 101 shield on it, but I couldn't get a picture from a good angle.
My employer, which is a pharmaceutical distribution center, had an old map of the north central part of the USA hanging on the wall by the shipping restroom once (before they redid everything). Amongst other things, it showed US 73 going north from Omaha and US 136 and US 275 ending in St. Joe, MO. I believe it also had some of the pre-1969 Iowa highways on it as well. I don't remember if they had any interstates on it, even if only they said they were under construction. I wish I knew what happened to the map, but I believe when the current head honcho came onboard, he got rid of it. Now that I think of it, they have an old Nebraska highway map (I've never determined if it is a state-issued map or a commercial map) above the drinking fountain there. I have no idea why they thought it was important to have one there.
Ugh. Would it kill them to use the real FHWA font? Hell, even Clearview is better than Helvetica.
At an International truck repair shop in Arkansas...the attempt at button copy is a nice touch:
(https://www.aaroads.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.formulanone.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2012%2F08%2FMaxxforceBanner-ButtonCopy.jpg&hash=8a16ec40f0fc287cedab0e4096905c8a02992d01)
oh god they stretched the buttons into ovals!
ladies and gentlemen, that should prove once and for all that stretching fonts on the computer may be easy, but that doesn't make it right!
I had to take that photo at an angle; those "buttons" were indeed circles. Of bleeping course the fonts aren't right.
Quote from: formulanone on August 30, 2012, 03:28:12 PM
I had to take that photo at an angle; those "buttons" were indeed circles. Of bleeping course the fonts aren't right.
ah okay; it is a very wide angle shot