I frequent Illinois’ east-west corridor of Interstate 88 with a certain degree of frequency.

My spatial sense of the route has been shaped by maps (mostly Google), perhaps in significantly greater proportion than the actual act of driving it. My Place sense of the route has been shaped by the set-back structures that pass while driving. Despite this, mapping and interstate driving are similar in scope: both offer a broad, generally glancing look at the area they represent.

This week, as an exercise in experiential diversity, I chose instead to follow Route 38. 38 and 88 run parallelesque, both functionally east-west vessels, but I found the difference between them to cover far more than the mere differences in effective speed and net toll cost: The interstate was built for location. The roads were built for place.
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