Interstate free (122nd new thing).

Living about forty miles from work lends itself to a ton of highway driving every week. I usually tune out and plug in a podcast or NPR or turn to the oldies station and the drive flies by. But I decided to try a new, more scenic route to and from work on Day One Twenty-Two. I avoided the freeway completely and took the long way to work.

The trip wasn’t exactly scenic considering the main part of the journey was twenty miles up Buford Highway. But scenic is a subjective word, and there was much more to look at than the speeding cars up and down I-85. I was actually able to listen to nearly an entire Doug Loves Movies podcast in each direction, chuckling to myself as the panel played the Leonard Maltin game.

It felt like I stopped at the majority of the traffic lights on the way up north, so on the way home I decided to count how many green and red signals I got. The result was overwhelmingly positive (as in green). Out of 84 signals, I only stopped at 26. And counting, like any childhood car game, makes the journey go more quickly.

While I wouldn’t try to avoid the interstate every day (unlike in LA, in Georgia the highway is indeed faster), I did enjoy having something other than speeding cars to look at. Maybe I’ll start having a “Friday No Freeway” policy.