skyring

I've often looked down from a plane and seen these long ribbons of concrete stretching across America. In fact, it seems that a goodly proportion of the USA's land surface is composed of these things.

But I'd never had much experience of them, except in their secondary role as urban freeways.

ResQgeek and MrsQgeek were having breakfast when I came upstairs, and we had a half hour of visiting. I'd crashed out very early the night before. I say I don't suffer from jet lag, and I don't, but sometimes it gets to be a long day for me if I'm awake early packing up and stuff, and by the time evening rolls around, I'm like my laptop with a low battery condition, fading quietly away.

But a night in the wonderfully comfortable Qgeek guest bed recharged me and I was ready for the long day on the road down to Charleston. Hugs all round and off we went, quiet suburbia merging into schools and shopping malls and the very beginning of Washington's peak hour - all going the other way north as we pointed our noses south.

I must confess that even after several visits to the USA, I am still in awe of the vastness of the enterprise. America is a big and prosperous nation. Industrial areas stretch on forever, huge warehouses with fleets of semitrailers parked outside, all loaded down on groaning springs with pallets of (say) yogurt tub lids.

There were four lanes each way, when we hit I-95, plus two in the middle for "high occupancy vehicles", which are cars or buses with several occupants. The two middle lanes switch directions according to the time of the day, and also have a higher speed limit. This encourages car pooling.

Personally, I think that there are limits to suburbanisation and putting people into mediumdensity housing instead of converting all the parks and farms to suburban tracts might be a better solution.

[Long skype with Teotakuu, and I've run out of time. More later]