What's in your collection?

[Buffaboy]

Where do you all get this stuff? Thin air?

All I have is a 90s era NYS license plate, and a picture I took on I-190 in NY.

Edit: I have an atlas somewhere, I've always kept a globe on my dresser, and I once actually had a customized map of my hometown, but it's forever gone now. I also have a few of the folding maps you get at the rest stop, but unfortunately, many of the ones I would collect over the years have been thrown away.

One of my most prized possessions is a fictional map I worked on for years on a 20" x 28" poster board, drawing with crayon, permanent marker and colored pencils and making corrections with whiteout and a label maker. It was called "BuffaboyLand" (with my real name), and I used the marker to create a huge island and a smaller island to the NW of it (and later, one to the SE and SW). It hung over my bed, leaving whiteout crud on the bedframe that still exists. I planned out all the cities and streets (which were just lines), but because of the scale of the actual map, most of the large island was urbanized. When I wanted to make "edits" to it, I would pull it down, grab my pens and work away. And the street and highway layout was very exaggerated; some areas would be too spread out and others compact. Some interchanges would be huge, and others so tiny cars would likely have had to go at 5 mph on the ramps. So in a way, this was like a hardcopy version of OpenStreetMap, but with a blank canvas.

The map has been under my bed for the longest now, but about a month or two I looked for it and it mysteriously disappeared. I'll eventually go search for it again, but if somebody did something with it I'll be pretty upset.

Also, I would collect pdfs of various EISes for mostly commercial developments, but I would also download and save pdfs of highways plans.

[Mdcastle]

50 traffic signals, a couple of street lights, a few hundred maps.
My display- SE corner by North Star Highways, on Flickr
IMG_6147 by North Star Highways, on Flickr
IMG_6150 by North Star Highways, on Flickr
IMG_6148 by North Star Highways, on Flickr

[wphiii]

I'm starting a collection of PA paper maps. I want to start with other states because in here, Staples and some bookstores sell paper maps. I only have two paper maps: 1 from the state capitol my mom gave me from 2015, and (technically) 1 "paper map" (really a book of zoomed in maps of areas of the state) from 2009. I can't really find any historical ones unless I dig in Amazon.

There's a map vendor who sets up shop at Eastern Market in D.C. most weekends, I stumbled upon his stall a few weeks ago and bought a Gulf road map of PA from the late 20s or early 30s or thereabouts.

Other than my own photos, though, I haven't ever really made a conscious effort to "collect" anything - I just have a handful of things like the above that have caught my eye here and there. Probably my most prized roadgeek-ish possession is a limited edition of Stephen Shore's A Road Trip Journal.

I do have a bunch of maps/brochures from various NPS sites that I keep meaning to pull together and organize, I guess that'd be about as close as I get to an actual themed collection of anything road/travel related. I also have a bunch of stickers/decals that I put on my car or my computer and quite a large number of t-shirts from my travels but there's no real rhyme or reason to where/when I pick those up.