Moment You Knew You Were A Road Geek

[Sanctimoniously]

I was drawing car designs and maps for various fictional places in elementary school. I was probably fourteen or fifteen when I first stumbled on roadgeeking sites.

[Duke87]

My father can tell you a story from when I was about 3 years old where I was in the passenger seat of his car (where I always insisted on being) and a friend of his was in the back seat. He mentioned where he was going and I out of nowhere said something along the lines of "oh, go three more lights and make a left". His friend at first thought it was cute. But his smile then turned into a shocked stare when he realized that I wasn't just playing - I was fully aware of where we were and how to get to where we needed to be going. At 3.

Of course, while my skills for navigation have been exceptional as long as I can remember, at a young age my obsession was more with maps than with roads. And with trains, but that's another matter.

I remember when I was in middle school (1999ish), my mother came to me one day and said there was this website out there that had lists of every exit off of every highway. That was a mistaken exaggeration, it turned out, but the website she had found was NYCRoads and there were indeed links to exit lists on it. I subsequently spent plenty of time browsing around that and similar websites, reading up on things... heard about MTR, but never ventured there. After all, I wasn't allowed to talk to people online without my mother's supervision (hey, I was like 12!).
As I went to college in The Bronx, my roadgeekiness went into a bit of remission in favor of obsessing over trains. Partly since I did not have regular access to a car, but the subway was there anytime I wanted it. And partly because politically favoring transit seemed kinda cool at the time.
But then there was a series of turning points. January of my senior year, this forum came into existence and a certain someone who shall not be named posted about it on another forum I frequent. So I registered. And gradually, I started talking to people here. Then, that summer, I got my own car as a college graduation gift and was for the first time in my life free to drive wherever whenever. And then, that fall, I noticed that a road meet was happening only an hour or so from where I lived, so I decided to check it out, not really knowing what to expect... and the rest is history.

[huskeroadgeek]

The first time I was aware of it was on a family trip to Colorado when I was 7. I found myself drawing pictures of freeway signs-particularly exit signs and mileage signs. Then on another trip to Colorado a couple of years later, I checked out a Rand McNally atlas from the library so I could follow our trip on the map. For Christmas that year, my parents got me my first atlas-an H.M. Gousha(I always did like it better than Rand McNally). When I was 12, I planned out our family's 2 week trip to the Pacific Northwest. With a little help from an older brother, I printed out on our family's computer a daily itinerary that specified how many miles we would drive that day and what route we would take, what sights we would see, and where we would spend the night. Of course, I wouldn't have actually called myself a "roadgeek" until years later when I found some roadgeek-related websites and saw people using the term-and I knew I definitely was one.

[empirestate]

I was ten years old and we had just moved to a new house for the first time that I actually remember. I was riding my bike around the new neighborhood and accidentally took the wrong street to get back to my house. Realizing my mistake, I resolved to get a map to better familiarize myself...the rest is history.

(That's the pivotal moment, but not the only one. I had been falling asleep to road and world atlases while listening to my father practice the piano since earliest age; both became irreversibly instilled in me. Many years later, about 1997 I discovered that the Internet allowed me to pursue what I thought had been my own isolated interest in maps and roads; that happened while I was earning my music degree. I still relish any opportunity to ply my profession whilst travelling the byways of America. I actually think the two are related, but I haven't yet found the way to explicitly articulate it.)

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

When I was in Kindergarden, for whatever reason I noticed that my teacher had a Commercial Survey Red Book of Lake & Geauga Counties. She actually let me take it home, though I made the tactical error of doodling in it (much to the horror of my mother). I had to apologize to the teacher for doodling in her book, but this started my interest in roads and maps.

[Brandon]

I was for years, as far back as I can remember, reading maps and drawing cities, and of course, being the navigator on trips (that, I picked up from my father - he could even be considered a closet roadgeek as an urban planner with an affinity for maps himself).  I learned of the term; however, when I was in college, maybe 1996 or so.

[Dr Frankenstein]

I had some mats, plus a few I drew myself on large sheets of paper.

[KEVIN_224]

As a kid, coming back from Wells, ME to central Connecticut...I seem to remember having some sort of a traffic light-styled pull chain, which you'd have on the end of a chain for maybe the ceiling light in the bathroom. Also, I remember buying my first RM Road Atlas at the age of 13. More on this as my mind becomes less foggy.

[huskeroadgeek]

Curious if anybody else had a relative that they took after in being a roadgeek. From the time I was little, I was said to have taken after my grandmother in that. She was never into it as much as I was, but she loved to travel and enjoyed using the maps to plan trips and navigate for my grandfather on trips. She also used to do trip diaries while on vacation-something I used to do too when I was little. I eventually got all of her trip diary books-going back as far as a trip she and my grandfather took in 1941. My grandparents were AAA members too, so they'd always get maps and tourbooks for every trip-all of which they saved. They'd also often pick up state highway maps on their trips. All of this was kept in one file cabinet drawer-needless to say, when I was little I spent a lot of time going through that drawer.

[1995hoo]

Probably when I was nine or ten, reading signs along the Thruway on weekend family trips (sometimes out loud--much to my parents' chagrin) and looking through my grandparents' 1971 Rand McNally atlas.

My brother and our cousin and I used to do that, also out loud, when riding in my grandfather's car in Brooklyn going around the Belt Parkway to and from Breezy Point. But the wrinkle was that we read the signs exactly as they appeared–the sign reading "Coney Is Ave," for example, was pronounced just like it looks; "Ocean Pkwy" would be pronounced like "Ocean Pick-way"; etc. My mother must have wanted to smack us hearing all that day after day, year after year, especially because we didn't just say what the signs said, we yelled it out in unison as little boys are prone to doing. (Although had she tried to smack us I would have pointed out that it was her father–i.e., the grandfather with whom we were riding–who had gotten us started doing it, so she should have been mad at him.)

My grandfather died in 1991, but to this day I still think "Coney Is Ave" whenever I travel on that road.


Something else I forgot when I posted before: When I was in the fourth grade we had an assignment to draw a map of a fictional place and then use "landmarks" on the map to give "clues" to a "treasure hunter" who would use your map to "find" something (basically the idea was just to give directions to see if someone could "navigate" using your map). Everyone else focused on putting in things like landmarks and the like and then saying "go north at the mountains, then go east at the lake," etc. I focused on filling in roads wherever I could fit them. (I also vaguely recall my island being shaped like Pac-Man, but that's another issue. It tells you the time period, certainly.) Funny, as I type this I'm remembering another mapping assignment in high school when we had to make up a map of the island in Shakespeare's The Tempest. That time I didn't include any roads at all; instead I tried to provoke the teacher by giving all the places pop-culture names like "the Cliffs of Huxtable," the "Strawberry Fields," etc. I seem to recall her not taking umbrage.....that time, anyway. I remember getting in trouble when I wrote a short story that had a man named Maxwell Edison using his silver hammer to fight the Knights in White Satin.

[ShawnP]

Checking the age of some. I feel sorry for the younger generation who didn't get to see the road boom of the 60's and 70's. I came of age at a time to see many roads get completed in the early 70's.

[Beltway]

It started after I got my driver's license at age 16, and particularly when observing the reconstruction of Shirley Highway in Arlington VA in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

[US71]

Probably after I found the original Roadgeek Yahoo group. I'd been interested in roads and signs for a long time, but the Internet made easier for me to find like-minded people.

[formulanone]

I remember getting in trouble when I wrote a short story that had a man named Maxwell Edison using his silver hammer to fight the Knights in White Satin.

:lol: As I'm finding with my kids, they enjoy taking songs exactly in context, or mis-hearing lyrics just as I am wont to do. Seems like an epic battle, though.

[1995hoo]

I remember getting in trouble when I wrote a short story that had a man named Maxwell Edison using his silver hammer to fight the Knights in White Satin.

:lol: As I'm finding with my kids, they enjoy taking songs exactly in context, or mis-hearing lyrics just as I am wont to do. Seems like an epic battle, though.

Don't want to take it too off topic here, but I knew the song was not "Knights in White Satin." I just couldn't resist punning on the name because it was too perfect for what I was writing. The teacher wasn't annoyed at me for changing the song title, she was annoyed at my putting puns and pop-culture references into what was "supposed to be a serious assignment." I recall she also said "there were no surnames in medieval times." (Man, I had forgotten all this until this thread made me remember that stupid map of the island. Too bad I don't have a copy of it somewhere. I'd scan it. I spent a lot of time drawing that dumb thing.)

Misheard song lyrics could be a whole 'nother thread on the "Off-Topic" subforum.

[BamaZeus]

As far back as I can remember, I could have been termed a "roadgeek".  At a very young age, I was given the official title of navigator for all family trips, as I excelled at reading road atlases, and had a great sense of direction.  I've been known to argue with the GPS in my wife's car, when I know where I'm going and it insists on taking me on a slightly different route.

One time my grandmother thought she was being smart by asking me if I knew the way to San Jose because the song came on the radio.  I don't think she expected me to know that it was such an easy trip from NYC, being that I-80 takes you almost all the way there

Like many, I drew my own road maps, many based on things I had seen on family trips.  I still have a few of them in a folder somewhere at home. 

I never sleep well in moving vehicles, so I always paid attention to what I was seeing along the road, and enjoyed seeing new roads completed, like I-95 through Florida, etc.  Now I go back on some of these same roads on trips, and I'll remember back when it didn't exist, or changed drastically.

[amroad17]

On some of our family trips from Hampton Roads to Syracuse, my father always relied on me to get around Wilmington, DE--usually finding US 202 north from US 13.  This was before I-495 and LONG before I-476 were built.  Plus, there always seemed to be some sort of detour to US 202 in Wilmington that my dad missed one time because I was asleep.

[bassoon1986]

I don't know when I would have first heard the term "roadgeek" to know that I was one. But I do remember the first time friends or someone on a trip caught me writing down stuff from exit signs on the interstate. I'd have a notebook with the exit numbers on the far left in the margin then write the sign info and draw the highway shield and number. 

[kj3400]

I believe it started with mass transit. I was riding our city's light rail, buses and metro from a young age. I remember trying to collect the light rail and subway and all the bus schedules just to look at the maps. I was especially excited when they came out with the citywide map with every bus route on it. I didn't get into roads until I was about 10 or 11, when I took my first trip to South Carolina. I didn't know where I was going exactly but I memorized it. After that I started drawing roads on paper, with signs, signals and everything. I also recall reading through a road atlas, but I don't remember which one it was. The second time we went to South Carolina, I knew the way by heart, and even the parts that were cloudy to me came back. That was when I knew, but the term didn't come to me until I was a teenager. By that time I was known as the human GPS by my family.

[Roadsguy]

I've been into roads since as long as I can remember...

As for knowing I was a "roadgeek" (term-specific), thank Kurumi. B)

[Scott5114]

I thought I was just a weird individual that knew a little too much about signs and maps. I didn't know there were others until the day I searched for the name of the street I lived on at the time in Google. It was an obscure rural road, and its only claim to fame was its I-35 interchange. So the only thing that popped up were I-35 exit lists. One of those was Eric Stuve's site... you mean not only is there someone who likes signs as much as me, but he's photographed them all so I can look at them??

[kphoger]

I thought I was just a weird individual that knew a little too much about signs and maps. I didn't know there were others until the day I searched for the name of the street I lived on at the time in Google. It was an obscure rural road, and its only claim to fame was its I-35 interchange. So the only thing that popped up were I-35 exit lists. One of those was Eric Stuve's site... you mean not only is there someone who likes signs as much as me, but he's photographed them all so I can look at them??

Oh, yeah, Eric Stuve is how I am able to live with myself.  I might be a roadgeek, but I'll never approach the level of Eric. 

[kurumi]

I thought I was just a weird individual that knew a little too much about signs and maps. I didn't know there were others until the day I searched for the name of the street I lived on at the time in Google. It was an obscure rural road, and its only claim to fame was its I-35 interchange. So the only thing that popped up were I-35 exit lists. One of those was Eric Stuve's site... you mean not only is there someone who likes signs as much as me, but he's photographed them all so I can look at them??

Oh, yeah, Eric Stuve is how I am able to live with myself.  I might be a roadgeek, but I'll never approach the level of Eric. 

The standard unit for roadgeekiness is the milli-Eric. Mr. Stuve himself is 1000. Alex and Andy are in the high 800s. I'm 553. (Carl Rogers is NaN.)

[kphoger]

I thought I was just a weird individual that knew a little too much about signs and maps. I didn't know there were others until the day I searched for the name of the street I lived on at the time in Google. It was an obscure rural road, and its only claim to fame was its I-35 interchange. So the only thing that popped up were I-35 exit lists. One of those was Eric Stuve's site... you mean not only is there someone who likes signs as much as me, but he's photographed them all so I can look at them??

Oh, yeah, Eric Stuve is how I am able to live with myself.  I might be a roadgeek, but I'll never approach the level of Eric. 

The standard unit for roadgeekiness is the milli-Eric. Mr. Stuve himself is 1000. Alex and Andy are in the high 800s. I'm 553. (Carl Rogers is NaN.)

Where is the mE calculator so I can find out my own measurement?

[kj3400]

I wish to find my own standing as well with this milliEric measurement method.