So, several announcements.
First and most obviously is I resized the header so the image I originally wanted up there is finally up there. It was taken very early in the driving and so you can see that it’s mostly freeway BGSes. Still, it’s an upgrade over what was there.
And that brings me to another thing. I will be done with Washington’s highways by Christmas time. And with that I am pleased to announce that I will be embarking on the state of Oregon. Now, Oregon is interesting. With regards to Oregon’s routes, I have decided that I’m only going to drive those routes recognized as “posted routes” by the Oregon Mileage Inventory reports.
There’s reasoning behind this. Whether feasible or not, I would like to drive every mile of state highway in the country. I know this is lofty and highly unlikely ,but I”m going to act as if that’s the plan. And if it is I need to set a precedent now. I don’t want to have to get to Pennsylvania and have to drive a bunch of 4000-series reference routes absolutely nobody cares about, or be expected to drive every Farm/Ranch road in Texas or every secondary route in Virginia. I’m sticking with trunkline officially posted highways. If a highway is recognized by the DOT as unposted, it’s probably not a very important highway. The argument I’d make here is that of the 39,000 miles of public road in West Virginia, 34,000 is state maintained. But a hell of a lot less than that is actually a state highway.
So I’m setting a precedent now with Oregon. Sure, diehard purists may not say “Yeah, you’ve driven every mile of Oregon Route in Oregon” and that’s completely OK with me, because the point of this is to have fun and as long as I enjoy it I’m going to keep doing it.
That said, I’ve registered oregonroutes.org. Right now it just redirects to washingtonhighways.org’s Oregon page, but in coming weeks I’m going to setup a similar setup over there and move all the Oregon pages over there.
I will follow certain arbitrary rules. For instance I intend to keep the same corridor directions. So since I drove I-5 northbound in Washington I’ll do the same in Oregon. Since I drove Washington SR 125 southbound, I will drive Oregon 11 southbound. I’m going to work on getting milepost information for Oregon, and that is feasible with the ODOT video log (not quite as nice as SRWEB but it works).
The focus will be on the Oregon ROUTE system, not the Oregon highway system. The Route system is much more useful for the end user and the layperson (this goes along with only the signed routes. An unsigned route is of no real use to anyone except people who live along that route, and even then the number designation is completely useless). While I will be familiarising myself with the highway system, I probably won’t talk much about it except at junctions with highways (so when I-84 goes from Hwy #2 to Hwy #6 at the US-730 junction I may make a note of it, but that’s it)
Anyway, I’ll keep you updated, but not to get too far ahead of myself I still have six more months of amazing Washington highway driving to do, and that’s the priority once I get back over there. In the next few weeks before school starts though and I get back to Washington I’m going to do as much legwork on Oregon as possible.