The Internet Loves a Rest Stop in Breezewood, Pennsylvania
citylab.com
citylab.com
I find this tiny bit of Americana comforting. I don't know if there is another country so large that is so consistently developed. There are so few places in America where you might end up out of range of these basic comforts, despite our fairly massive landmass.
Having driven across the US a number of times, I think the last product this isn’t true for is good quality coffee. There are still parts of America where you can travel several hundred miles without seeing a single standalone Starbucks.
For anyone not willing to put in that effort (or just take a risk), forget about it— that person will just stay on the highway and wait out the next Starbucks.
Parent is right, there are still huge stretches with neither starbucks nor indie shops of any quality, and not just in the empty bits out west.
I've always wondered about the economics of espresso shacks. Obviously the fixed costs are very low, a literal shack and bit of nigh worthless rural land. Each one appears to be a unique and creative local business with no underlying corporate chain tying them all together but the sheer pervasiveness of them makes me wonder if there is a well-oiled corporate business model underneath it all.
Looks like there's a lot of crossover with the "bikini barista" concept, which I could picture being off-putting to some. I guess that's another plus for a national chain— your morning coffee isn't going to turn out to be something embarrassing to have to explain to the kids in the back seat.
The coffee is legitimately very good in my experience. It is common in that part of the US to drink coffee with neither milk nor sugar.
Here is nice blog about them with a ton of pictures:
I'm guessing their popularity has grown a bit. I noticed a chain of them when I was in Kansas City a few years ago.
I’ve heard from others that these places have good coffee, but, perhaps unfairly, I am repulsed by them.
Mix ground coffee with lukewarm water in a 1:4 ratio and let it sit for 12 to 24 hours. This creates "coffee concentrate". Mix the concentrate 1:4 with water to make your final coffee. (Tweak final ratio to taste: these ratios are set to my personal taste)
Even if you use cheap no-name coffee from grocery stores, the coffee tastes great. Grinding your own beans will result in fresher coffee.
The purpose of "concentrate" is that "concentrate" cold brew is easier to process (less to filter), and easier to store. You can pick up bottled water virtually anywhere in the USA. So carrying around the concentrate is easier.
You can also do cool things with concentrate: like make espresso (add milk instead of water), or "impromptu hot-brew" (boil some water, add the concentrate. Since you have 4:1 hot water to concentrate, your temperature will be 80% of the hot temperature).
With 4:1 final mixing ratio, a quart of concentrate becomes 1.25 gallons of coffee, more than enough for most trips.
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"Ball" mason jars are pretty universal in the USA. I'm pretty sure they're sold everywhere (more common than quality coffee at least, lol). So you shouldn't have any issues getting mason-jar equipment for storing liquids.
Just don't use their leaky white-plastic caps. Use their gray "leak proof" caps or their steel-caps if you actually want a liquid-tight seal.
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Alternatively, drink McDonalds coffee. Its actually not bad. I know plenty of foodies who avoid McDonalds EXCEPT for their coffee.
I'd agree with that, but with the additional comment that it depends on your region of the country. In some area's it's not just "actually not bad", I'd assert "very good". McDonald's often customizes it's menu to the local region. In New England, McDonald's serves Newman's Own coffee, which I quite enjoyed. At least, they did when I lived there a decade ago - who knows now.
Area Man Holding Out Until Next Exit For Better Fast Food Options https://local.theonion.com/area-man-holding-out-until-next-e...
I might not be so annoyed if I actually liked the common roadside places, but as it is, “McDonald’s next exit” is more of a threat than a promise.
Really?
How about you drive in Italy, you still find "service" and food every 10-20 miles, but food completely changes every 40-50 miles.
There are chains, but most are mom-and-pap shops, you can call them "trattoria" or "osteria".
I grew up in Italy. As much as I like the US, on the food side there's really no comparison.
Give it a try.
Sadly, quality varies considerably. People go to the big chains because they're a known quantity. A fair number of those mom-and-pop restaurants don't make from scratch. They heat up what comes off the Sysco truck or the warehouse club. The Internet makes it a bit easier to find a restaurant with real local character, though reading the reviews is kind of an art form: they'll get a lot of praise for generic, boring food and few reviewers will recognize a gem when they find it.
The US can't match the food culture in Italy, but with a bit of knowledge you can eat well here.
I still don't quite follow this line:
> "highway planners designed a looping interchange that lets drivers avoid the turnpike if they (hypothetically) want to"
That seems no different from any other exit (you could hypothetically avoid any toll road by exiting and stopping and just staying wherever you are), but I guess the actual 'bypass' function of this road in the real world is less important than what it's come to be.
And the answer is no, but it's pretty similar.
The photo (mainly due to use of the telephoto lens) provides a sort of dense charicature, but the overall look can be found in lots of places. Not the most beautiful aspect of the US, but a reasonable one. We're a huge, sparsely populated country where many people still get around by way of long driving trips. If you've been on the road for eight hours and you and the kids are hangry, often you want some gas and a reliable, safe, familiar meal. Gas stations and fast food chains provide that.
Criticizing these photos is a bit like criticizing a landfill or sewage treatment plant as reflecting on the beauty of an entire area. It's essentially utilitarian infrastructure. It's ugly, sure, but you can't have everything be ivy-covered brick and artisanal bakeries.
Looks a lot less...interesting than the photo.
Does it really have to be so ugly to be functional? This isn't some out of the way piece of infrastructure, these are areas of high traffic density and it is not unreasonable to ask why aesthetic considerations are so universally ignored in these types of areas in this country.
People- interactions- matter more than places do- the happiest family I've ever met lived in a poorer neighborhood and their house was obviously not doing well.
Highwayland is the America that connects the other Americas together. It spans the entire continent by itself, but everywhere else is only a short drive from it. No one lives there, but everybody passes through. The interstate highway system didn't create Highwayland, but homogenized and unified it.
Everyone is a little bit comfortable in Highwayland, but also a little bit bored. It has McDonald's, Subway, Taco Bell, a Cracker Barrel, a 4-story 1-corridor hotel with indoor pool and fitness center that offers free copies of USA today in the lobby, a 2-story discount motel where the room doors open to the parking lot, the dine-in restaurant open from 6 to 10, two gas stations or truck stops across the road from each other, each with their own bustling convenience stores that sell sausages, egg rolls, and round tacos that cook on the hot dog roller, with 128-oz fountain drinks, all for $4.
If it were too interesting, people wouldn't want to leave, and the transit dimension would clog up with loiterers and squatters.
You can take a photo of Highwayland from anywhere in Highwayland, and see all the same features, but you can also strike out in a random direction from Highwayland, travel 15 minutes, and find a place unlike anywhere else on Earth, with its own local character that is instantly identifiable to anyone that has ever been there.
Sometimes the local character is strong enough to overwhelm Highwayland, just for a few miles (Highwayland abhors kilometers), and the uniqueness seeps in. Maybe you can see the city skyline, or a university campus, or a hospital. It doesn't happen often, though. Highwayland craves sameness. Mostly, it is the realm of the consistent, the predictable, and the reliable.
Ernst Haas took basically the same picture in New Mexico in the 60's.
https://www.mbphoto.com/artists/167-ernst-haas/series/other-...
This had its own consequences, which you can see rather clearly in many smaller Western towns that formerly sat on a US Highway. The road through town which served as the highway spawned a great number of restaurants, gas stations, and especially motels. When a freeway was built along the same route as the US highway, it departed the old highway route before and after the town in a curving 'bypass.'
The result was that the businesses in town lost their large pool of customers passing through, and often relocated or went out of business. This manifests throughout the west as a blight of abandoned and run-down motels doomed by the freeway system. You can often see this pattern in cities as well as smaller towns (e.g. Central Ave/historic US 66 in Albuquerque, Powell Blvd/US 26 in Portland). The bypassed highway sections were often, but not always, later signed a "business loops" of the freeway (fwy number on 'transparent' or green freeway shield), a designation which promised that following the road straight on would put you back onto the freeway reasonably promptly, but this did little to help the problem.
And so, new businesses formed along the immediate exit of the freeway, which was at the outskirts of the town since the freeway was placed far enough out to obtain an unimpeded right of way. This has contributed significantly to the loss of the historic cores of towns and even cities, as well as reduced the economic vitality of many of these "truck stop towns."
To a large extent, the freeway system created the modern American roadside stop. But, at the same time, it destroyed a different version of the roadside stop that had thrived before it. Just like the US highways had before it, and the railroads before that, right back to Puebloan trade routes in these parts.
>Breezewood is a deliberately awkward transition between Interstate 70 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, where they (almost) meet. Back in the 1950s, as I-70 was being built, a law prohibited spending federal funds to channel drivers directly from a free road to a toll road. The law was later overturned, but to comply with it, highway planners designed a looping interchange that lets drivers avoid the turnpike if they (hypothetically) want to.
More detail from Wikipedia:
>I-70 uses a surface road (part of US 30) with at-grade intersections to connect the freeway heading south to Hancock, Maryland with the ramp to I-76, which through this section is the Pennsylvania Turnpike toll road. According to the Federal Highway Administration the peculiar arrangement at Breezewood resulted because at the time I-70's toll-free segment was built, the state did not qualify for federal funds under the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 to build a direct interchange, unless it agreed to cease collecting tolls on the Turnpike once the construction bonds were retired;[11] a direct interchange would have meant that a westbound driver on I-70 could not choose between the toll route and a free alternative, but would be forced to enter the Turnpike. However, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission was not willing to build the interchange with its own funds, due to the expected decrease in revenue once Interstate 80 was completed through the state.[11] Accordingly, the state chose to build the unusual Breezewood arrangement in lieu of a direct interchange, thus qualifying for federal funds because this arrangement gave drivers the option of continuing on the untolled US 30.[11]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breezewood,_Pennsylvania#Unusu...
Yay stupid bureaucracy...
If that law didn't exist at the time, I could totally see local politicians and their federal representatives colluding to put revenue-generating toll road segments into the federal highways. I'm not sure why the law was later removed, but maybe once a critical network of free roads was established, it made sense to allow toll road connections for other local highways the feds didn't want to pay for.
When I first passed through this place due to work, driving from one work location to another, I stayed the night because I could and "was allowed" [by the job] to break up the drive. It was a nice demarcation; some catching-up on "The Shield" was had.
As jobs and life moved on, since I have some extended family and friends around the Portland area, Grant's Pass remained a demarcation but in different respects: as a boarder-crossing signal, as a sign-post, as a pit-stop as needed whilst I just kept going "straight on 'til morning" [I preferred one long drive back then, can't be sure now for reasons].
I cannot tell you anything particularly special about Grant's Pass other than "it's near the border" and "I-5 goes through it". No offence intended to people living there.
Going south, we'd usually stay in Red Bluff of Redding; going north, Grant's Pass or Roseburg. And, regardless of need for accommodation for the night, these towns (and many others, but these are the largest I remember) offered ample fuel and fast food options.
The "avoid the turnpike" part refers to the fact that the segment of road in the picture, which has to be traversed to get from the turnpike to I-70 or vice versa, is actually US Route 30, so hypothetically someone coming off I-70 could just stay on that route instead of being "forced" to get onto the turnpike. There are a couple of other interchanges on the PA turnpike that work similarly: the one with I-79 north of Pittsburgh (US 19 is in between) and the one with I-81 at Carlisle (US 11 is in between).
Most freeway interchanges between toll and non-toll highways don't work like that; you just go straight from one to the other.
Due to a quirk of a now-defuct law causing an abundance of low speed traffic, an unusually dense set of typical off-interstate chain stores and restaurants sprung up around a Breezewood, PA interstate exit. This location has become popular among Web users for creating photos embodying the homogeneity and cultural sterility of such places.
There, headline and first couple sentences of a non-clickbait article for you.
With that said I think the central premise of this article is mostly false. There are a lot of places in the US, typically at major interstate highway junctions, that look exactly like this.
As it is... it's just a somewhat incoherent conclusion. "It could only be Breezewood, because I say so". Ignoring the whole purpose of the meme.
This is one of only a handful of locations in the US where a highway travels along regular roads. I've heard though the state has finally approved funding for an interchange to be done by 2025 (last I heard).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breezewood,_Pennsylvania#Unusu...
What doesn't help is that the PA Turnpike is pretty stingy with its rest stops, especially in the western half of the state. Most states have rest stops at about a 30mi cadence, but you've got ~70mi from the last rest stop in PA to the OH border and closer to ~50mi cadence--assuming the rest stops aren't closed for reconstruction. So even those rest stops are pretty crowded, to the point where you can have the driver get in line for gas and everyone else go to the bathroom, wait in a line that stretches out the door, and still get back to the car before it reaches the pump.
I think part of what makes this photo look unique to many is that Pennsylvania sits between the extremes of the Northeast's planned rest stops, and the Midwest's natural four-corners ones - so it's exceptional from both. It's larger than one standard concrete building with pluggable vendors, and it's denser than fuel stops with truck scales, overnight parking, etc. Pennsylvania also has this hilly thing going on that tends to concentrate, hide, and focus business gatherings.
Travelling across the country, the real depressing pattern is McDonalds ahead 10 miles, ... 5 miles, ... 2 miles, ... 1 mile, .... half mile, "turn around you missed McDonalds!", next McDonalds 36 miles, repeat. I believe the bigger rest stops actually break the homogeneity by offering more variety. But on longer distances, one actually comes to see the value in chains - predictability. And I say this as someone who goes out of my way to avoid chains.
Of course that's all still focused on the commercial infrastructure that supports travelers. If you're roadtripping, especially west of Pennsylvania (ie clear of the Megalopolis), and not basking in the novel landscape, you're doing it wrong.
In Pennsylvania ("Penn's Woods") the under-developed landscape still towers so gigantically above the developed landscape that I wonder what people think they are seeing during travel. Of course, things pop up to serve the travelers along the highway, so the from-the-highway view is not truly typical, but still. The developed landscape seems all that is considered.
But I see a Pennsylvania that is vast and filled with forest.
Err... yes. It's the worst part of the food creation process. Ugly and brutal.
This is a big part of America. The highway systems and the towns and businesses that support it.
Like sausage making is to Italian food. But I feel that seeing this and saying 'this is it', is unfairly failing to see the larger whole. This is the method that allows American's to travel anywhere within their country in a super efficient way that other countries can only dream of. Where I'm originally from, if you can plot a 100 mile line from where I was to some destination I wanted to go, it was a 200 mile road trip that would take 7-8 hours. Here in America, most destinations within a 100 mile radius take a 120~ mile drive which will take under 2 hours. I have explored a ton of places in this country because of the ease of moving around. The sausage factory sucks, but I do love sausage.
It's effectively a supersized rest-stop consisting of a drag of fast-food chains, motels and gas stations. The article is right, and it's pretty unmistakable if you've been there before. Yeah, depending on your point of view it's a hyperreal mash-up of everything that's wrong in the American urban landscape.
There really is nothing to do there other than pee or get gas.
If you are up that way and want to stop somewhere interesting that's nearby...
Bedford PA (http://www.downtownbedford.com/) -- has a charming historic "mainstreet" with interesting shops, restaurants and festivals.
Bedford Springs Resort (not far from Bedford), is posh old hotel with superb spa with natural spring water and access to some really good hiking. Sort of like that hotel in "The Shining", except without horror. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omni_Bedford_Springs_Resort)
Even today it's been voted the most McUnderEndowed area in the United States.
http://www.datapointed.net/2009/10/distance-to-nearest-mcdon...
It does have some pretty cool taverns and in fact a father-son duo wrote a book just on the U.P.'s bars.
https://www.amazon.com/Yooper-Finest-Michigans-Peninsula-Sep...
If you go have a pastie and if you're brave go out at night hunting YooperLite rocks that glow in the dark.
I hate suburbia more than most, but I have alot of memories from this meme of plastic America.
That's why I always stop at Breezewood.
I’ve been to the US for short trips, Norwalk - CT, Miami, NYC, nothing special about these places but from what I recall you could easily take a similar picture: Chipotle, Macdonalds, Walmart, Subway, Gas stations all lined up in a short stretch of road.