Early road memories where you can't identify the location

[bandit957]

Anyone else frustrated by early road memories where you can't figure out the location?

When I was about 3, back around 1976, I remember being on a road that seemed to have a tree growing in the middle. I remember that we may have turned left at the tree. I've always wondered about this, but I've never been able to find it.

I remember another interesting road back when I was about 5, which I know was in some local neighborhoods, but I just don't know exactly where.

[Max Rockatansky]

Not really super early but slightly over half a life ago when I just turned 18 my brother and I took some ATVs out into a desert wash north of Phoenix.  The trip was notable since I crashed pretty badly and ended up with a sprained leg on top of a concussion.  I know we took AZ 74 west from I-17 but I have no idea what road we turned onto much less what wash it was.  I know the area was fairly mountainous which makes me think it was in the Bradshaw Mountains.  In 13 years living in Phoenix I never could locate the same place even with all the off-roading I did in the area.  I haven't had any similar instances like this except maybe when I was younger than five years old, I attribute it to getting my bell rung. 

[BrianP]

I had one.  I finally found out where I think it was.  It only took me almost thirty years to figure it out though.  I was about 5-6 years old.  I remember being forced to exit a freeway because it ended.  But you could see the roadway continued on.  So they had what I think were piles of dirt blocking you from trying to keep going.  I think this was US 1 in PA when it ended just east of I-95 at Oxford Valley Road. I think this was in the early 80s when I saw this.  I finally found the answer thanks pahighways.com.

Also that year, the expressway was completed from the Turnpike interchange to I-95 while construction was extended north of there to the Oxford Valley Road interchange.  In 1972, the section from I-95 to the Oxford Valley Road interchange opened.

In 1984, construction began on the last link of the Bucks County US 1 expressway between Oxford Valley Road and Trenton Avenue which finally opened in 1987, thus completing US 1 in Pennsylvania as it is seen today.

Also on historicalaerials.com you can see in 1971 the highway was being constructed at least a quarter mile past the Oxford Valley Road interchange. 
I do have another early road memory but it's just too vague to have anything to go on.  Which that's is frustrating to not be able to get an answer on that.

[ET21]

Mine would be stopping at some rest stop which had a playground right next to the highway. Part of me thinks it was in Wisconsin but I could not find the wayside where I know I've been in the state.

[US 89]

I have a few, but for all I know they could just as easily be vivid dreams I had once. The one I remember best is being with my dad, driving across some sort of big bridge in a city. But this exact scenario happened in a dream I had within the past year or so, which makes me think it never actually happened.

Another one is I distinctly remember being stopped at a red light just after sunset, looking at a streetlight with a large black bird on it. This one I'm pretty sure happened in real life, but I couldn't have been any older than 4 and I have absolutely no idea where it was.

[3467]

I have one very young being in the back of the car a 58 or 59 caddy. We had to run to Chicago and it was middle of night . It was early Interstate but We were on a 2 lane with curves. I think it was  US 34 near Mendota.

[Joe The Dragon]

Where is there an Drawbridge where there is a gate on an ramp that links to it.

[roadman65]

I remember once as a child going to California from New Jersey.  I remember a suspension bridge that had an arch through the towers that resembled the Brooklyn Bridge arch with the point.

[Max Rockatansky]

I remember once as a child going to California from New Jersey.  I remember a suspension bridge that had an arch through the towers that resembled the Brooklyn Bridge arch with the point.

About the only one I can think that even kind of resembles it is the western span of the Bay Bridge. 

[RobbieL2415]

Thanksgiving, 1997, there was a bad snow squall line that moved through the Syracuse area.  My family got stuck in it driving back from family dinner.  It was bad enough that an (unknown) portion of the Thruway was closed and we almost got stuck spending the night at a Day's Inn.

1998, I remember being driven along a portion of Boston's old Central Artery.  Not sure exactly where.

2014, I was driven from Winston-Salem to Raleigh after a gig at a brewery, but I was too drunk to notice how we got to our destination.  I slept through the whole ride.

[ce929wax]

I remember the McDonalds at the corner of US 27 and SR 32 in Winchester, IN circa 1991.  My older brother was hungry, but Mom said she didn't have any money to stop anywhere.

[Super Mateo]

I had one of these for years, trying to figure out where my dad took us to get Christmas trees when I was little.  The sequence went stop sign, railroad track, stop sign, then a curve, forests, and a right turn into open fields.  After about 20-30 years, I figured it out.  It was IL 113 in Braidwood, IL.  The Christmas tree farm was/is on Essex Road.

[jeffandnicole]

The one and only time I was NYC with my parents, we were driving back from a vacation in Maine.  We were stuck in traffic on a rainy night on what was probably I-95 going thru NYC, and I remember looking up on a street off the highway and watching a car getting stripped.

[Rothman]

I have what is probably a false memory of a very early trip to Chicago where we were driving on a road that steeply rose to a T-intersection right before the intersecting road went across a bridge to the left (I assume to the west as we traveled north).

I've looked for such a location along our possible routes and can't find anything resembling the memory, so I dismiss it as bad data in my brain.

[bandit957]

I have what is probably a false memory of a very early trip to Chicago where we were driving on a road that steeply rose to a T-intersection right before the intersecting road went across a bridge to the left (I assume to the west as we traveled north).

There was actually something like this in downtown Cincinnati, though the bridge was to the south.

[sbeaver44]

I've had 3 from when I was 5-6 that I have since figured out, but drove me nuts for probably 15-20 years until I did:

-The scene of PA 144 just South of Renovo where power lines cross the river
-A gas station and convenience store along US 11 in Mount Jackson, VA; it's the Liberty station/Circle K today
-The view from the end of DE 6 at Woodland Beach

[epzik8]

I might have been in Fairfax County, Virginia with my family going to my paternal grandparents' house in Dumfries around 1999 - I would have been 4 years old - and my hazy memory associated with that was being on some weird gravel ramp going to an interstate. But it probably wasn't Fairfax, nor was it a gravel ramp.

[Ned Weasel]

I had a false memory of a jughandle on US 54/400/Kellogg Avenue in Wichita, from the pre-freeway days.  I must have confused a mental image of the intersection of Kellogg and Rock Road, or a nearby intersection, with a mental image of a US or state highway in New Jersey.  I still can't figure out exactly what location in New Jersey it was, but I can narrow it down to a few guesses.

[ErmineNotyours]

I remembered a road trip to see my aunt at the Love Israel cult compound (for lack of a better word) near Arlington, Washington.  I remember riding a ways off the freeway and turning left (north) near a town, so when looking for it again I looked at Arlington and roads that went north from there.  Nothing seemed to match.  I remember this was the weekend when Dumbo premiered on The Wonderful World of Disney, which I just found out was September 17, 1978, when I was 10.

The sequence went like this, on the turn off the highway, we missed the turn and had to turn around at an available space.  This was by a house that had a neat hand-painted sign telling motorists to turn around in the driveway, not the yard.  It must be a popular missed turn.  Soon we descended down an elevation, crossed a river, and rose back up again by a blank, spray-painted-out billboard.  We passed an old white school house.  Then we got lost and asked for directions as a small general store, across from a wood and cable suspension bridge.

I knew that the property became a  Jewish summer camp, but understandably they do not publish their address.  It took some sleuthing to find it.  On the second or third Google search page was a Snohomish County building permit with the camp's address on it.  When I found it, I realized I had been on the road recently and I didn't even recognize it.  When wasting time at work, I looked at the Snohomish County Parks page and found a park built around a wood and cable suspension bridge left open as a pedestrian crossing.  I used that as a centerpiece for a Granite Falls to Arlington and back bike ride.  I biked most of the route and didn't even recognize it.

These features still exist: the house where we turned around in front of.  The left turn we missed used to be a sharp turn, but has been reengineered.  The river crossing.



The Schoolhouse.  The suspension bridge.  (It's hard to tell which building used to be the general store.)  And finally, The site itself.

[DandyDan]

I used to live in the Twin Cities area in Cottage Grove. When I was a kid, Mom worked in South St. Paul. After I moved here to Mason City, I have spent several weekends in the Twin Cities area trying to recreate the old routes we used to take to various places. I know Dad used to drop us off at Mom's work occasionally but I don't remember the way and the business doesn't exist anymore and possibly the building doesn't exist. I know it was north on Concord from 494 and there was a right turn involved, but after that is a mystery.

The other mystery is the street my Mom's cousin Claudia and her family lived on in far southeastern Minneapolis, before they moved. You could look south down her street and see an airplane parked outside the hangar at MSP airport, or at least see airplane movements. I believe it was always a Northwest airplane, FWIW. I suppose I could ask Mom, or perhaps my uncle Dave, but I like to think I could remember that.

[D-Dey65]

In 1990 my family and I drove up to Albany to visit my cousin who had just given birth to her one son. We took the New York State Thruway up, and on the way down we took the Taconic State Parkway. There was some huge mansion on the side of the road that I swear I've seen before on some old road trip before I was old enough to go to school.


On the other hand, many other road trips and other places I've been to in my life, I used to dismiss as false memories and even dreams... until they came true.

For example there's that intersection in Westchester County, that had the turning ramp lined with stop signs. I'm still convinced that was Hawthorne, New York just off of NY 141. I also remember that after this I've been on a local street, and then turned onto another one that went down a hill in the middle of the woods until it reached a dead end at the bottom of a hill.


But another one in southeastern Westchester County still puzzles me. It involved a dead end street in a more developed area where the road goes up a hill then stops. The questions I've had about it boggle my mind. Was it in Mount Vernon? Was it New Rochelle? Larchmont? Was the dead end for the New England Thruway? Hutchinson River Parkway? The current Metro-North New Haven Line? The Harlem Line?

My mother has a relative in Bronxville who she wants to visit before one of them dies. Last night, I even considered the possibility this woman might've lived on such a street.

[bandit957]

A lot of memories I have aren't really roads, but I still can't identify the location. I remember one evening when I was about 5 (around 1978), we all went to this place somewhere around Cincinnati that was sort of like a shopping mall but was in more of an open-air structure. The shops were things like arcades and ice cream parlors. It may have even had a merry-go-round or something. I've never been able to identify where this was.

[Route66Fan]

Back in 1993, I remember going on a roadtrip, with some relatives, to Wisconsin & as we were working our way back home to Missouri, I remember being on some road in what I think was probably Southern Iowa. We were heading West on some road & then turned South on another road. Once we turned South on the other road, we pulled off onto the West side of the road & We had to get out & put some RainX on the windshield because we were starting to go through a thunderstorm. I originally thought that the road that we turned South on was US 65, however, I also remember being on US 36 West of Hannibal, MO & US 24 at the junction of MO 11 West of Brunswick, MO & that we had to detour North of there due to the Missouri & Grand River flood.

I also remember on another trip a year later, with relatives, being on what I think was East I-70 in Indianapolis, IN & going across, what I think was a sweeping overpass.

Another more recent memory (From 2013.) that I have was going on a trip from Missouri, on up North to Minnesota on I-35 (Once again, with relatives.). We used the stretch of I-35 from Liberty, MO to Ames, IA on both the trip up & the trip back (Although on the trip up there, we went all the way up to Owatonna, MN). I remember that somewhere on I-35 between Lamoni, IA & Des Moines, IA that we came across a partially demolished overpass, which extended across one set of lanes, but not the other.

[CapeCodder]

In the summer of 1995, I visited my grandparents in St. Louis. We drove up to Massachusetts in August.

Our route happened to include a stop at West Point.

In that vicinity, we were on a road that went down a moderate hill to a creek/pond/lake that was crossed by a stone bridge. At the other side of the bridge was a cool looking stone house. I've been trying to find that area on GSV. I cannot for the life of me find it.

I'd need a medium to ask my grandfather where it was. He died in 2015.

[bandit957]

I just remembered something else, but I know I've mentioned it before. Back in 1976, just before I turned 3, we went on a trip to visit relatives in Philadelphia. Somewhere up that way, we drove past this weird device in the median of a highway. It was a big, tall pole that had a beak-like mechanism that constantly opened and closed.

I know I've mentioned it on one of the road forums before, and someone said it was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and that it was old rail signal left over from the 1940s.