Updates

Saturday, June 21, 2008

New Thing #162--The Road Untraveled

I've seen a lot of changes in my area of St. Louis County in the 20 plus years I've lived here. Most of the green space and farms are gone; there are many more subdivisions and a lot more traffic. The county has gradually improved the roads to carry the extra cars. Now there's only one last unimproved section of Big Bend Road, and that's in the process of being widened.

Today I was driving home and saw that asphalt had been poured (adjacent to the current road) for the "new" Big Bend. Although the new section was closed, there was a small jog each end so vehicles could get into subdivisions. Past the subdivision entrances, there were "Road Closed" sign at both ends. I decided that closed roads only applied to vehicles, so I parked my car and took a walk on a road that hasn't been opened.

It was a spontaneous decision, and I quickly turned left into a small neighborhood. I parked the car and started walking. There's a lot of grade changes in the new road. They leveled out some of the inclines, and filled in some of the low spots, so the pavement is flatter. At 10:00 on a humid Saturday morning, the asphalt really radiated the heat, so I finished my adventure in about 15 minutes and returned to my car.

2 comments:

  1. Are you having any of the flooding problems I keep hearing about on the news? I see the footage of all those homes and farms under water and it just makes me ill. Sort of like New Orleans all over again.

    ReplyDelete
  2. No, we're not having problems with flooding. My neighborhood is about 30 minutes west of the Mississippi River. We had some problems earlier in the spring when a closer river, the Meramec, almost closed the Interstate closest to us, but its not affected this time.

    They say that flood levels along the Mississippi will not be as high as they were in 1993-the last time there was a major flood.

    ReplyDelete