In case anyone actually wants to know the answer: it’s the plot of Cars. The difference is literally the plot of Cars.
Highways are usually two-to-four (at the widest) lane roads that meander the US landscape. Think Route 66, dinosaur statues, mom-and-pop diners, southern gothic. There are state-level and national-level highways. Some run for a 100 miles, some, like US HWY-17, run most of the East Coast:
That red line is US HWY 17. If you follow it, you will go through tiny towns. You may hit stoplights. I kid you not, you will see spinning cows on poles. Businesses exist along highways that you are encouraged to pull over and visit. They were designed to let you see America.
Yeah.
Now, interstates were made in the 50s and were made to get people from Point A to Point B. These suckers range from four lanes to eight lanes around big cities. They cut through everything. If you want to get to a business, you have to take an exit ramp and detour. They are great for getting places fast. You can still have weird experiences on them, but usually at night, when your eyes start playing tricks on you. Or there are deer.
I-95 is a massive corridor that runs from the Florida Keys to the Canadian Border. You can see the difference just looking at the maps.
As far as writing goes:
If you want quirky character development inside the car, you’re looking for an interstate. The majority of Americans take interstates to go on road trips.
If you want mysterious and/or supernatural hijinks, you’re looking for a highway. They are weird, weird places, and they’re surprisingly easy to wind up on if you leave the interstate.
(Even in America, no one’s really sure what a freeway is. Just ignore it.)
Freeways exist in big cities where cars are more prominent than public transport, such as LA or Atlanta. You’ve year of liminal spaces? Freeways during rush hour are a physical manifestation of hell.
Awesome! Now what the hell is a turnpike?
If you find out, let me know. Maybe ask someone from New Jersey.
A turnpike is a highway with a toll. Turnpikes are special highways where you drive really fast and it’s usually linking big cities with each other and you keep going until you hit a toll booth.
They’re called “turnpikes” because in the olden days, there were pikes or barriers up and you had to pay the toll for them to be raised or turned to let you in.
Mind blowing.
Further input from North of the border:
In Canada, we have Routes, Highways, and the Trans Canada.
Now, routes and highways are kiiiinda the same thing? Like officially one road will be called a “route” when going through a small town, and “highway” when going through a bigger town or city. But pretty much everyone just calls them highways.
The Trans Canada is a highway that literally goes through every province.
It splits off in a couple of places in the bigger provinces, but yeah, that’s the idea. It’s our equivalent of the interstates.
to add on tho, highway has become an umbrella term so the big interstate roads are also called highways a lot of the time. I’ve never used the word interstate in conversation lol
There are now more than 90 people dead. You can bitch and whine that’s it’s hotter where you are, but you have to understand that it’s the elderly, homeless and small children who don’t have air conditioning and are susceptible to health problems. How fucking despicable can you be to just laugh at people dying because temperatures are hotter where you are. Our infrastructure was built to withstand -30 C°, not the heat. It’s not about how Canadians are “weak”, it’s literally just shitty circumstances.
Not to mention that people who are accustomed to cold climates have a physically more difficult time coping with temperatures that their bodies aren’t used to. Also a lot of people who have never had to cope with hotter temperatures aren’t as familiar with heat exhaustion or heat stroke, don’t know how to manage the heat safely , etc!
That last point.
Denmark is currently in its hottest summer ever recorded, and the number of people I’ve talked to who have only now discovered what a heat stroke is amazes me, because I grew up in the South of France where summers are hot as fuck every year – my brother-in-law went out for a bike ride without a hat and with a half a liter of water for three hours and came back and was sick because of it.
The idea that he’d get sick because of the sun didn’t even OCCUR to him, because in his 30+ years on this green ball swirling through space, it’s never been an issue for him.
In the South of France, most cafés have mist sprayers and all shops / malls are air-conditioned. In Denmark, most cafés do NOT have mist sprayers (but heat lights!) and the shops are not always air-conditioned.
Most of the warehouses have been out of portable air-conditioners and fans on an off since May because people are hot and have no air-condition installed. The buildings are built to keep heat IN. Not out.
No air con, buildings designed to keep heat in, not even ceiling fans, no drinking fountains, windows that don’t open in buildings, and we expect people to work in those buildings, in their full uniform which has no ‘hot weather’ option – I mean what employer is going to provide short sleeves and shorts for that one week every three years where it gets above 25/80 degrees? – windows that don’t open on public transport, and often no shade while waiting for said public transport, we have heaters and insulation and draft excluders, we buy black cars and dark clothes, we buy sunscreen for our holidays in Spain, then forget where we put it, when we find it and apply it we sweat it off again because we’re not used to the heat, we walk places rather than drive and even if we drove, our cars don’t have proper air con and we don’t have covered parking, school playgrounds and public parks have no shade, people don’t have pools so kids play out all summer in the heat. We don’t have ‘American style’ large fridges or freezers with ice makers and they break down when competing with hotter than usual ambient temperature, most of us don’t even own cool boxes – or if we do it’s at the back of the shed full of spiders.
So yes, we have to be told it’s going to be hot. And we have to be warned to check our elderly neighbours and to help them take the blankets off their bed or to swap to a summer duvet, to suggest they have a cold drink instead of a pot of tea and take off their cardigan.
Because we only know people who got sunstroke on their holidays abroad.
And we have never in our lives known anyone who died from the heat.
To anybody who thinks it’s funny when people die, you can go fuck off a tall bridge.
I live in Phoenix. It’s going to be 115F/46C degrees today. This is nothing unusual for this time of year. And yet every year we lose people to the heat. I can’t imagine what super temps must be like when you are not used to it. England, Quebec, and most of Europe’s home were designed to keep heat in. Not let it out. So instead of giggling like evil children over someone else’s horror, try being a little more understanding at the very least of what they are going through.
Also drought and a heatwave here in the Netherlands. We’re famous for our waterways, and now we have a ever-increasing shortage of it. We have to literally pump water into our waterways to prevent them becoming salt from incoming seawater. Heat can be dangerous and should be taken seriously. Take care of yourself, and take care of others.
this slow moving hulk ripping its way out of the bottom of the cloudbase raked slow across the prairie fields. It gave me so much time to make time lapses (follow my IG if you want to see the time lapses) and get pictures, then it went a bit insane and shrouded the world in blinding straight line winds with mini vortexes swirling everywhere as it suddenly raced towards a populated city (airdrie). I was legit concerned about this guy hurting people but it passed just south of airdrie and never did throw. Still, a majestic prairie monster giving thrills and copious hail–which somehow, again, I avoided.
Not only are you acting like a jackass that thinks your country is some fucking utopia, you’re also just injecting politics into an observation.
Exactly. As a proud Canadian ofc I’m gonna tease other countries and say mine is better because of maple syrup and the stereotype of people being more polite, but damn well know Canadians fucked over First Nations people more times than there are days in the year and that we’re no better than any other first world country.
Wait…bagged milk? Are you kidding me?
Have you never heard of bagged milk?
I have. It still perplexes me to this very day
I don’t see why milk in bags is so weird when we already have juice and soda in bags.
That is equally as weird tho
..
Listen I’ve always thought Canada’s claim to bagged milk was weird because the summer camp I go to uses them (cheap + less waste + 5 cents per bag for the camp) and I’ve been going there since long before Canada was anything more than a name to me. Bagged milk exists in the US too. I never really thought it was weird.
Yeah and alternately I’ve never seen bagged milk in my entire Canadian existence and only heard about them for the first time when I was around 13
Yeah I mean I haven’t spent a ton of time in Canada but I’ve literally only ever seen it at that camp and definitely not in Canada. It’s a weird thing to me honestly.
ifesbob 
