Lincoln people together

There wasn't a heck of a lot to see from the hotel room we stayed in in York last week, as you can see.

We weren't in the thick of it.  The most interesting thing about that picture, as far as I can tell, is the road running through the centre of it.  That's US Route 30.  If you turned left on it and drove and drove you'd eventually end up in Atlantic City, New Jersey on the Atlantic coast.  If you turned right you'd eventually find yourself in Astoria, Oregon on the Pacific Coast.  It's a road that runs across America.

There are several of these, a notable one being Interstate 80 which also runs through Pennsylvania on its way from New York to San Francisco.  But even though it has been superseded, Route 30 is interesting because it was made up largely from large parts of the Lincoln Highway, the first highway to cross the country.  Many stretches of Route 30 still follow the Lincoln Highway, though the bit in the picture above is not one of them, but rather one of the many bypasses that evade town centres that the original highway passed right through.  On the whole, though, Pennsylvania is a good state in which to follow the historic route.  It's a nice drive and some stretches (such as west of Lancaster) give a real taste of what highway travel must have been like in the US during the first half of the twentieth century.


It's said that the Lincoln Highway inspired the vast Interstate Highway System which eventually put it and its friends in the shade, after President Dwight D. Eisenhower, then in the army, travelled along it in 1919.  It may not be as famous as Route 66, but it has outlasted it (lasting almost a hundred years is itself an impressive feat here) and gathered a lot of history along the way.  I think Route 30 deserves to be remembered, even if it is by a foreigner who doesn't drive.