tribe nuge and for emergencies only.

The roads in Michigan suck. At some point, the Michigan Department of Transportation, tired of having to repave every road every year due to the ridiculous bad weather, said, "Screw it. Just leave 'em. It'll keep the tourists away." So now they spend all their money on those Adopt-A-Highway signs. The roads suck, but they sure are clean.

We have Adopt-A-Highway in North Carolina. In fact, I've participated in it before. Back when I was too young to stay at home by myself, my dad would take me with him when the Ruritan Club cleaned up Highway 18 in Lenoir on Saturday mornings. So I'm used to seeing the signs, but I'm not used to seeing the kinds of organizations that clean roadways in Michigan. I think it's probably more of a big city thing, because big cities have enough people to support obscure organizations. So while Lenoir (population: 17,000) has the Ruritan Club, the Kiwanis Club, and even the West Caldwell High School Key Club, Detroit (population: 950,000) has the Jamaican Association and the Muslim Association of the West Suburbs. I suppose Lenoir could have a Muslim Association, but two miles is an awful lot of road for one dude to clean.



I obviously have not seen every single Adopt-A-Highway sign in the world, but I feel like I can say this is one of the best. This organization is real, and what's more, they're eco-friendly (depending on whether you define hunting as eco-friendly). It makes me wonder - did Ted Nugent himself help clean this very stretch of interstate highway? Was I taking this picture from a shoulder made litter-free by the Nuge himself?

The mind boggles.

Note that Michigan also has signs on all the ramps to the interstate that list the types of vehicles that should not be on the interstate. One of these vehicles is farm implements. Not even in North Carolina do we have to tell our residents not to drive their tractors on the interstates. Perhaps that is why the roads are so bad - people keep trying to plow them. I also saw one sign that prohibited farm animals. I suppose a horse pulling a plow is definitely out, then. Silly me, though, I forgot to take a picture.

A bonus thousand words, to make up for the fact that I've been such a slacker blogger lately and haven't even been able to cough up a picture and accompanying entertaining commentary. Here, at least, is the picture. Commentary follows, but no promises on quality.

I have two that I considered for this one, but this one is basically another sign, and I thought we'd go with a theme here. Did you know that Detroit is just a short swim in a remarkably clean-looking river away from Canada? It's true! Luckily, there's also a bridge, which is the route we took. This is a view of the Ontario River with Detroit looking shiny in the background. But the sign, ah, that's where it is. Zoom if you must.



Simple pleasures for simple minds, whatever, but I think this is amusing. See, I'm just picturing someone drowning. No, no, that's not the funny part. The funny part is the dude standing on the shore, trying to verify if the other person is really drowning, because he doesn't want to get charged $300. "Are you absolutely sure that you are drowning? I mean, you're positive on this one?" Then maybe the shore guy finally does throw the life preserver out in the river because he realizes that he's in Canada, and so the fine is only like $266.38 in US dollars.

Well, I thought it was funny.