Nuke and pave

I’ve been thinking for a while that the county should either rename our road to Pothole Parkway, or stop playing whack-a-mole with the deteriorating asphalt and get serious about repaving it. And since there’s a lot of bike traffic on weekends, put in bike lanes while they repaved.

Wide and smooth

Mirabile dictu, the universe must have been paying attention for a change. The county is repaving the road… and putting in bike lanes!

Of course, before repaving, you have to de-pave. The results remind me a lot of the dirt roads when I was a kid in southwest Michigan: wide and smooth. Back then, the road commission would run a grader up and down them on occasion, then follow up with a coating of oil. Not only did it keep the dust down, it created something almost as solid as pavement. (They switched to something a little easier on the environment in the late 80s.) I remember piling eight teenagers in a VW Beetle and blasting our way down those roads at around 65MPH, trying to catch up to the people who knew where we were supposed to be going! Every once in a while, there would be a pothole, and some of the passengers would levitate for a moment.

But I digress. With Sally threatening to lay down a huge amount of rain, they panic-paved as much of the first section as they could. That was probably for the best, because the first section includes the steepest slopes (not like there’s any flat sections). We did get a lot of rain, but not the wash-out-road amounts that some were fearing, and most of it wasn’t that heavy. So the work goes on.

They started on the far end from FAR Manor, which is okay. We won’t get disrupted until the last leg. I'm hoping Mason and I will be the first to ride the bike lane all the way from north to south.