It's nice that they are active groups as that makes them more interesting but it gets a bit irritating to not be able to keep up. You would think that with all the email lists and and message centers like Yahoo and eGroup and Delphi that the newsgroups wouldn't be as active but they still are busy. I wonder if the newsgroups are still growing thought?

Both groups get a bit technical for me as I enjoy finding out where roads go and where people go and how they get there and why they went that way, and the newsgroups are mostly what sign is used where and what type of bus a city is buying, and such. The historic roads such as the Santa Fe trail and the Oregon trail are especially interesting as there wasn't a "highway" for the first ones but just a destination.

Most of the roads have historically been to get somewhere but I enjoy the getting there as much as the destination. So many places are stops along the way where some people dropped out of the journey. In fact, on thinking about it, everywhere is a stop along the way since some people always go a little further. Sometimes it takes years, or decades, or even centuries for those people to go on but someone always has.

Many of the road webpages have pictures of what was such as old motels and closed gas stations on bypassed highways. People are always looking for a better way to get some where and it doesn't matter how dependent a place is on a road, if another way is better the old road will start to die. Sometimes it's picturesque or sad, but mainly it just shows the ingenuity of humankind in finding a better way.

Sometimes the bypass is only a mile or even a block or two, but it still changes how a place is used as old places lose customers and new places take their places. It's nice when the old places can be turned into well taken care of reminders of what was, but there are too many of them for this to be a solution for more than a fraction.

I like walking along the old US-89 route in Tucson and enjoying the old motels that sprang up during the creative motel period when every place had a gimmick to pull in the tourists. Now most of them are rented by the week or the month and house the transients that float through all cities. The area they are in has run down too even though it's still a busy route to downtown. I-10 is a mile or so away and took the energy from the old route, but it's an interesting reminder of the heady days when ordinary people could first afford to take their family on a vacation.