You can get your kicks on Route 66, and Route 50 traverses enough desert in Nevada to be called “The Loneliest Road in America,” but other major U.S. highways either don’t rhyme well or are more social. In the U.S., coast-to-coast highway numbers end in “0”, increasing from north to south, but there are exceptions. U.S. 10 originally extended only from Detroit to Seattle, but it was considered important enough to earn its number. Many older routes have been subsumed by interstate highways, but you can still follow long stretches where small towns and remnants of 1950s motor culture mingle with newer development.
I spent a weekend photographing in Western Nebraska last January (2022) (see blog post), and a good deal of time last summer driving back and forth to the East Coast (blog post), avoiding freeways when I had enough time. Those trips piqued my interest, so Ed Sherline and I (see his excellent photography and Wind River rephotography project) headed to Western Nebraska for a weekend in early November. We made our way east along Hwy 20 from near Glendo, Wyoming into the Nebraska sandhills to Valentine before turning south and then east towards home on Hwy. 26, itself a major route extending from Nebraska to Oregon.
Ed and I get out once or twice a year to shoot photos. It’s an opportunity to commiserate about politics, talk about trips we’ve done and trips we’d like to do, nerd-out about photography without boring our families, eat unhealthy food, and drink unhealthy drink. Even though we stop at the same places, we always come home with different images. The photographer David DuChemin made the point in a recent blog post that even though “it’s all been done,” each of us brings a unique point of view to our photographs, something to strive for.
