I know that when the speed limit kicks down from 75 to 55 when you cross the border from eastern Washington to eastern Oregon, it's a supremely tragic feeling. In Oregon, a human is there to pump your gas. Western Montana has a weird obsession with hut-sized espresso drive-thrus that are often thematized (pagoda espresso hut, log cabin espresso hut, Christmas espresso hut...). McDonald's is cheaper in Utah than it is anywhere else I've found. The local newspaper in Dillon, Montana is one week behind the La Jolla Light, but they share the same crossword puzzles. There's gas in Illinois somewhere that is barely $2/gal (!!!). The local newspaper for some town outside of Missoula has very entertaining police reports. And oh man, let's not get started on California. Anywhere, all of everywhere in California. <3 Those kinds of things!
Anyway, what I meant to say is that when we drove down to West Virginia, the house we were supposed to stay at didn't have an address, so our contact just gave us the coordinates. Later when we spoke to her, she said that the town and its surrounding area (pop. 300) was only just getting its 9/11 addresses, hence the coordinates she'd given instead. It took me a while to dissociate 9/11 from the World Trade Center, but eventually I realized that she was talking about 9-1-1! And that they were getting addresses so that ambulances would know where to go. Which probably meant that over the years, the population density was getting (or at some point in the future would be) tight enough that coordinates wouldn't be as helpful as a straight-up address--like, are we supposed to be saving someone in the green house, or the blue one on the left?? At least, that's my theory. (And probably the town just did PO boxes at some central location, rather than have a hired mail carrier to go to every house, hence the association of addresses with 911, rather than mail.)
I thought that was the most interesting thing. I mailed a package earlier today, and my recipient's address is so unusual even the post office worker looked at me skeptically. For those who aren't American, or doesn't send a lot of mail to America, the typical American address looks kinda like
Kevin Tran
1489 Prophet St.
Neighbor, MI 48109
or you know, whatever.
This address is just like...
x PR xxx
City, TX
And the post office guy was like "uhhhh..."
And I was like no, "I swear that's the address."
And he didn't believe me, so he looked it up, and he was just like, "Oh. PR is a Private Road. Interesting."
(If you've ever driven into a National Forest or really anywhere near a lot of public land, you'll have come across the vaguely related dilemma where every road is an SR with some seemingly meaningless number attached to it, until the directions you try to give are just like "Well SR 206 branches off into SR 567 and SR 12 and you wanna take 12 and then at some point that will become SR 99 and then take a left on SR 56, which probably isn't marked, and then you should arrive at the piece of forest you want, which is identical to all the pieces of forest you don't want. Unless you miss that left onto SR 56, in which case you'll probably just keep driving until you end up in a completely different state.")
tl;dr I LOVE THIS KIND OF NAVIGATION-RELATED MINUTIAE and I would read entire fics of just random road ephemera. So my wishlist for S10 is:
1. ocean- or water-based case, preferably in the Pac NW
2. backwoods case with actual backwoodsing/camping involved!!
3. random shots of the Impala driving
4. Impala-based episode
5. entire episode spent in the Impala and/or on the road
6. random faux-curtain!fic-y scenes involving Impala maintenance, beautification, or organization
7. more overzealous shots of the Impala driving
8. more of those
9.
10. for the crew to have that same excitement and passion for all their ideas and arcs--the kind that would make Sera giggly and Kripke do that weird nerd smile and that inspires many of the other writers to take to Twitter and be completely sappy about their pitches and scripts and pumped in ways that make half the fandom wonder what drugs they're on and make me suspect they're out of their damn minds and then usually makes me fall in love with that thing they love, because it's so obvious they just fucking went for it and went big instead of going home, whether they actually stuck the landing or not ♥
