Musings on a motor trip in S.C., Ga. and Fla.
June 3rd, 2008 by adminThe Road Warrior and his wife, the Judybaker, spent two weeks driving a rental car around eastern South Carolina, Georgia and Florida recently. Here are some musings on the experience:
- I was told it was flat, and that’s for sure. When roads are built in the Northwest, designers try to balance the dirt removed in cuts through hills with that needed to fill the valleys, limiting the amount of dirt that has to be hauled and minimizing elevation changes for drivers. I don’t think I saw a single highway cut in any of the three Southern states. They all had to be built up with the shoulders sloping gently downward. I wondered where they got the dirt.
- Those freeways are unique in my experience. You can drive for miles without seeing signs of civilization, not counting the freeway itself. The shoulders are bordered in thickets of palm, long-leaf pines and other vegetation that kept me from seeing whether there were houses and businesses behind them or just more of the ubiquitous marshes that cover most of the coast. Interchanges were often 10 miles or so apart.
- The medians and shoulders were among the most litter-free I’ve ever seen, especially along I-95 in Georgia. And the pavement and medians were wide and well kept.
- I saw an interesting wrinkle on traffic signals at one (and just one) spot along Highway 170 south of Beaufort, S.C. The speed limit was 50 mph, and the red light had a white ring around it that blinked, calling attention to the light. Seemed like a good idea for all stop signals.
- South Carolina’s low, marshy topography requires lots of bridges and it is far enough north that they can have freezing weather in the winter. I puzzled for a while over signs reading “Bridge Ices Before Roadway,” wondering what bridge ices are and why they would be put before the roadway. I realized shortly that it’s just their way of saying “Watch for Ice” on an upcoming bridge.
- People tend to notice cars of the same model as the one’s they
own or are driving, so we were predisposed to see Priuses and Mazda
3s, which we own, and PT Cruisers, one of which Dollar rental cars
provided us. It was silver colored.
The Prius also is much in vogue, with gas prices jumping so
steeply. They are increasingly common in Kitsap County.
I was in Beaufort, home of the Parris Island Marine recruit center,
for three days before I saw a Prius there, and saw only six in
seven days there. I didn’t spot a single Prius in four days in
Orlando, and only one in three days on the Space Coast around
Titusville and Cocoa Beach, Fla.
I wonder if there’s some cultural thing in the South that keeps the
Prius from selling.
Mazda 3s were commonplace, and I came to suspect silver PT Cruisers
are the state car of Florida, or at least are revered in Orlando.
They were all over the place. I also had never noticed how many
there around here until I got back. Yet, Chrysler will stop making
it after 2009, according to Wikpedia, calling it a “now
slow-selling vehicle.”
- After four days in Orlando, I was still completely turned
around about which direction to go to get places. It began with
Interstate 4 being designated an east-west highway even though it
runs north-south (like Highway 16 here).
Our motel was near Universal Orlando. I wonder if any of you
readers have ever driven around Orlando and found it similarly
confusing.
Scripps Interactive Newspapers Group
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:12 pm
I lived in Florida for nearly five years and traveled extensively throughout South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana (government and political events).
We found most freeways and interchanges to be much better than those in Washington state, but agree with your assessment regarding Orlando.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
In the Florida Panhandle, I was told by a very pleasant and sincere man that “only Socialists drive hybrid cars. America needs to keep using oil to keep the country running.” He was absolutely sincere.
I would like to see a Waffle House in Silverdale, but it would be as unlikely as a Prius in Niceville, FL.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:20 am
I-4 runs from Tampa on Florida’s west coast through Orlando to Daytona Beach on the east. Since it runs SW to NE, I think they flipped a coin. Signage is not very clear. The tourist better know where Tampa, Daytona, Kissimmee, Winter Garden and Titusville/Cocoa Beach are because compass directions are of little help.
The toll roads are what make Orlando a nightmare. Leaving the airport practically forces one onto a toll road which is very clever of the locals to trap unsuspecting tourists. After getting stuck for a time at three toll booths between the airport and I-4, I hauled out a map and studied the surface street patterns. I never paid another toll in the week we were there. The surface streets are easier to navigate locally and I was able to keep compass directions straight.
The most egregious driving behavior involved approaches to the toll collection area. The two left lanes are for cars with passes and traffic moves very quickly. Not so in the cash lanes which were backed up a half-mile at a couple of stops. Some idiots stay in the pass lane until the last minute and then try to force their way into the cash lane. It causes a real mess and further backs up the cash lane. I’m surprised no one gets shot at.
In comparison WSDOT did a great job in designing the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collection area on Highway 16. Through and pay toll traffic are split off from each other early, avoiding the lane changing and crowding problems I saw in Orlando.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:48 am
Good comments, Don. I would only add for the benefit of the readers that the toll is 75 cents to $1 at each toll booth on the highways near the airport. I was particularly impressed to have to pay a toll a quarter mile before exiting the freeway to go to Orlando International Airport
June 10th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Don, thanks for bringing up the “toll” situation around the Orlando airport. The first one we went through we did not mind. The second one within just a few miles had us saying…uh, OK. The third one in a row and still not far from the airport pretty much pissed us off.
We typically fly into Orlando, not as a destination but as a pass through to family living in Southern Georgia and much sought after vacation experiences OTHER than what Orlando has to offer, or what we call Lemming Town. I just booked our vacation through there in November. Believe me, if I could use my Alaska Airlines annual companion fare for a city near northern Florida other than Orlando, I would do it.
Travis is correct, the signage is awful and vague. Having traveled through there about five times now, we can avoid the big mistakes and pitfalls and have learned to just get in and out as quickly as possible.
Travis, you can have a ton of fun in a high gas mileage car and think outside the Prius box. I am currently averaging over 30 mpg in my new sports car…..even with the top down. Also, we are staying in Cocoa Beach for two nights while we visit the Space Center with our 7-year-old, who loves math, science and space exploration. They even have a tentative Shuttle Launch scheduled for one of the days we are there. Did you happen upon any cool out of the norm, non corporate America, places to visit or eat while you were there? We are always on the look out for those.
June 10th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
I’m glad you asked, Colleen.
The Brevard County Zoo in Melbourne (or maybe Viera, they seem to be the same city, about 20 minutes south of the space center) is the most fun I’ve ever had at a zoo. I fed a girafffe, a deer and a bunch of little parrot-like birds called lories that crawled all over me. The zoo sells you the food for $1-2.
A cockatoo adopted my wife and me without seeking food, pecking at her glasses and my necklace as it sat on our shoulders. My wife fed an emu and petted a kookaburra.
After spending an hour on a river east of Titusville that morning looking with only modest success for alligators from an airboat, we saw all of them we wanted to as zoo handlers fed them and had them lunge out of water to get meat on a pole. Crocodiles, too.
The zoo is laid out into four segments that can be seen in three or four hours. Admission was only $11. It’s right at the I-95 interchange for Melbourne/Viera.
It was the highlight of our trip until we got to Epcot, which I found to be head and shoulders better than the other Disney and Universal theme parks. Of course, that would be expected of a 64-year-old. I think my wife and I were older by at least two decades than anyone else we saw in line for the coasters and thrill rides at the other parks.
June 10th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
When I lived in Iowa for a couple of years while I was going to college, I learned that they got dirt for building roads from the sides of the road, at least on two-lane roads in Iowa. They dig a wide ditch with gently sloping sides on each side of the new road and pile the dirt thus obtained in the middle. (I learned from a 1930′s road-building equipment brochure that the procedure was called “casting up”.) Then they flatten and pave the top of the pile. A bonus is that the roads have ditches that can safely catch cars that wander off the roadway. This happened to a friend who was returning from an apparently riotous weekend a day’s drive away. He woke up sitting in his car at the bottom of one of those ditches, ignition on but motor off, still in high gear. He just drove back up onto the road and came on home.
Dirt is cheap, but hauling it is expensive, so I’ll bet that they still build highways that way in the flatlands.
I’m with you on the flatness of SC’s “low country” at least. I was at a conference in Charleston and the highest place I drove all week was the bridge over the river near its mouth.
On another topic, I think that the environmentalists’ idea that there has to be a 100-foot or 200-foot space between the edge of the water and any waterfront building comes from the low country, where the boundary between land and ocean is often ill-defined and no one with any sense would build anything within 200 feet of the water’s edge. The environmentalists probably just borrowed some East Coast laws wholesale without bothering to adapt them to this area, where the water’s edge is generally quite well defined.