I ran around in the truck a lot today. Covered about half a dozen counties. Just shopping and visiting, really. But I noticed that things look differrent now.

Houses don't have TV antennas anymore. Everybody has cable.

Barns don't have farms anymore. They just sit there off by themselves and look wistfully toward the subdivision that ate the farm.

It used to be that things were scattered out along the highway. You would pass a gas station, and then in a short distance there would be a grocery store, and then a motel and a diner. Sometimes you would pass a welding shop or a car repair shop. There were roadside picnic tables, farms, and houses.

Now it's all in groups. You come to a thing called an "interchange" and it is surrounded by convenience stores with gas pumps, motels and fast food places. Not to mention turn lanes and red lights.

The other businesses, like the welding shop, are now confined to the industrial park which is on a service road that parallels the interstate highway.

Picnic tables, vending machines, and tourist information are all grouped into a thing called a "rest area." Or if it is near the state line, we call it a "welcome station." These are good places to stop if you like to listen to diesel engines idle.

The houses are grouped into the subdivisions.

The farms are also grouped. Many have been sent to California or Florida where a cabbage patch might be hundreds of acres. Grape arbors and orange groves stretch for miles and much of the work is done by machines the size of a small house.

Stores are stored in shopping centers that are required to be located at least 900 feet from the interstate, but not further than half a mile. If the stores won't all fit in the shopping centers, they must be nearby on "out parcels" which are connected to the shopping centers by parking lots.

And you don't just camp by the roadside anymore. There are campgrounds with cable TV, electricity, sewer hookups, internet access, a cell phone tower, automatic washers, snack bar and a catch-out pond for fishermen.

Yep, it's different now, maybe better in some ways.
Howard