Ohio has at least two hilarious road signs, though admittedly nothing even close to the picture of the three people running across the road, the third an airborne child, that we saw north of San Diego.

The first sign is "Resume Legal Speed," which regularly appeared after construction zones, which regularly appeared every mile or so on all Ohio interstates. This was not as annoying as it sounds, because, unlike Connecticut, which purposely blocks traffic with construction just for spite, Ohio seems to have mastered the art of keeping traffic moving through construction zones. But you do have to slow down to something like 55, and this is why, when you're past it, you get to Resume Legal Speed.

But what a way to word it. What, the construction zones are illegal speeding zones? "CAUTION: INCREASE SPEED ILLEGALLY AHEAD."

Anyway, we saw a lot of the Ohio state tree, that is, the orange construction cone.

Another sign remains inexplicable to me. It took forever just to figure out how to parse it, because there was no punctuation. It went: "PREPASS / FOLLOW / IN-CAB SIGNALS." After some investigation, we determined that these always appeared just before weighing stations for trucks, which in Ohio are actually, believe it or not, sometimes open. So I guess if you're a truck, sometimes you can have a prepass, and if you've got one, you have to follow signals that are in a cab? Beats me. Someone explain this.

In my previous post, I talked about the incredible courtesy we found in Ohio and Kentucky, and I used the Cracker Barrel as an example. The point may have been clouded by my joking, so let me clarify. I don't mean to say that here in New England everybody is rude. Naturally there are people that are, but on average people who work in public service jobs are courteous. I would not expect a worker at a Cracker Barrel to be curt from the inconvenience of processing a 14-person party, or even after upping it to an 18-person party after they had already made the arrangements for the 14.

The difference seems to be in charisma and demeanor, not simply the face of courtesy. Despite how social I am with the friends I do have, online and in person, I don't make friends easily, and I'm generally not comfortable socializing with people I don't know. I can do the small talk thing with strangers, though it was an ability I developed only in the last few years, but I almost never enjoy it. I need common ground, first of all, and second of all I don't have much of a use for casual friendliness: if I'm going to be friends with someone, make it a close friendship or nothing. The point is, I'm not very good at making friends. I don't like what it takes to start a friendship, and I don't care about that stage in the middle, between getting acquainted and getting close. Perhaps the reason I have such a social life online is that making that leap is an easier step.

Anyway, I could have comfortably made actual friends with probably half of the people I interacted with down there, particularly at the hotel. A friendly camaraderie -- not just mechanical friendliness -- was pretty much an automatic thing.

Virginia was more or less like this too, when I lived there, but although I was a teenager at the time, this was apparently still too young and/or inexperienced to have truly appreciated the difference.

The thing is, when my parents moved to northern New Hampshire from Virginia, they remarked on the great friendliness of the locals there, not at all in accordance with New England's reputation for coldness toward outsiders. It's just a different kind of chemistry, I guess. Regardless, there's a reason "southern hospitality" is a term familiar throughout the country, and it's something I miss.