Do you think the U.S. Post Office delivers to every address in the U.S.?

Something is fishy with the whole business.

Tom

 

Ha, that's good.

I am originally from Kalamazoo, Michigan. In Kalamazoo there is an honest to god street named "Lover's Lane", and one of my friends lived on it. It gets worse: His name was Joe Doe (at least it wasn't John Doe), so he had a driver's license that read:

Joe Doe
1234 Lover's Lane
Kalamazoo, MI 12345

Where the numbers were his real ones and not 12345. He had no end of trouble in college, trying to convince people that it was a real ID.

When we first moved to Northern Michigan 35 years ago, the post office was out of boxes. We had to wait for someone to move or die. In the mean time we had to use a General Delivery address, so we had the same problem as your friend with the yellow house. Using General Delivery for your street address makes you look like a vagrant. There were also no private phone lines available, so we were on and eight party line. That's right, eight, count-em, eight phones on the same line. You only dialed six digits, and there was no direct long distance dialing. You had to call the operator and have her put the call through. This makes me feel old just to talk about it.

Tom

 

Hi Michgal,

It's not that Ann Arbor has so much traffic, it's that there isn't much room for it. Many of the streets are narrow with on-street parking, and the campus and river disrupts the flow of the streets. In the summer or at non-busy times, it's pretty easy to drive around A^2 (Ann Arbor for the rest). The peak times are crazy, such as move-in week or before a football game. On Friday and Saturday nights you have to watch out for drunks in the street, but that's probably common for most university towns. I've driven in many large cities (Boston, Chicago, Houston, Cleveland, Detroit, NYC, San Fransisco, Paris, and many others) and you are right; A^2 is very small by comparison. Traverse City is the large city in this area. At 16,000 people, it's not a big city, but being the "big city" in the area, and being a tourist town, it has traffic problems. Peak traffic levels are much higher than that for which the roads were designed. A^2 has the same problem with peak loads (and bad drivers - honestly, where did those people learn to drive!?!). Mostly I like to pick on you. Think of it as a personal attack and not a slight against A^2 <smirk>.

If you visit Charlevoix you can wave to me over the bay. I'm out on the tip of Leelanau County, in the Village of Northport. We have a year-round population of 621, which makes us the largest village in the county. It takes us an hour and a half to drive to the nearest limited access highway. The highways around here are all two-lane 55 mph country roads. M-22 is the best know, and one of the prettiest roads in Michigan.

Stop and say "hi" if you get to this side of the bay. Anyone in town can tell you where the Wetherbees live.

Tom