Posted on 08/01/2019 5:03:55 PM PDT by foreverfree
It’s summer, and for hundreds of thousands of Americans, that means at least one burger-and-bathroom break in Breezewood, Pennsylvania. This half-mile gauntlet of gas stations, fast-food outlets, and motels, its oversized signs towering above the surrounding countryside, is familiar to anyone who has to drive regularly from the East Coast to the Midwest or vice versa.
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Far from being “Every Town, U.S.A.,” Breezewood is a weird, improbable blip of a place. It’s what an architect might call a unique urban condition—a churning mini-city where the population nearly turns over every hour.
Isn’t Breezewood known as the Windy City? Or maybe I’m thinking of Hurricane, Utah or Galesburg, Ill.
Never been to Breezewood, but always found Fort Stockton, TX on I-10 to be a huge truck stop with a tumbleweed town attached.
You need to really pay attention when going through Breezewood. The signs and roads are always shifting and changing people dart onto the highway and jump three lanes in seconds. Be careful.
I was born and raised in Michigan and went back after my enlistment in the AF to go to college. My wife was still active duty and was stationed in the Joint Staff so I made many a trip through Breezewood to go see her in DC.
I went back active duty after graduation and after several years I was stationed in DC, and we would go home to Michigan at least once per year to see our family.
Breezewood is a weirdly unique place.
For all the seemingly zillions of times I’ve gone through Breezewood, the thing I disliked most was facing a night time drive though Town Hill in a bad snowstorm...
I always thought it was weird that I have to get off the highway to get to the next highway.
It's always snowing when I need to drive from Hancock to Breezewood.
Coming from northern Ohio, getting on the PA Turnpike at the PA/OH line was an adventure: divided highway, almost no speed limits, and tunnels through mountains! It might have taken most of a day, but after traveling the rough the mountains of PA, we came out at an Eastern terminus, where our travels eastward would turn in a mighty geographic right turn toward the South land. I don’t recall the highway designation, but it was a broad surface highway at the time, “Highway to the Sun” they called it; and the long awaited turning point was the Breezewood exit.
No one around now probably can imagine what it was like, after hours of slogging through the snowy mountains of PA, to reach this key landmark. We would get off the road, have a meal at one of the many restaurants (I recall the “Wildwood Inn”), and marvel at the souvenirs and ephemera for sale, signaling that we were about to head to a new world, the Southland! No freeways then, just a federal highway from Breezewood all the way down the coast to Florida.
No doubt today, Breezewood has become only more of what it was then. But what it was then meant so much more than what it could possibly mean today,
Outstanding recollection! I remember as a kid our entering the PA Turnpike at Breezewood from Virginia and then clear sailing until our exit from the Ohio Turnpike hours later with a stop at Howard Johnson’s along the way. Souvenir shops, postcards at the `toll plazas’ in between east & westbound lanes, playing `auto bingo’ card games, the whole bit.
It was a different time.
Was that a problem?
Is there anything liberals won't twit/use/lie/fret about to justify their wish for total subjugation of the People? I say we need more folks willing to shove it back in their faces...
ff
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