Long live decay: Scenes along Route 301 in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida

 

Route 301, running from Deleware to Florida,  is one of those old highways that has been around forever and used to be the main way of getting from point A to point B. Then along came the interstate, with its fast-moving uninterrupted lanes and easy-on, easy-off exit ramps. Old 301 is still around and has parts that are thriving quite well, thank you very much, but there are also good chunks of it that have seen better days, with its abandoned motels and dilapidated old signs of places once prosperous but now left to rot along the roadside. These are the stretches we like the most and we had a nice, but all too brief, drive along the part of it from South Carolina down to the Sunshine State. The dreary weather seem very apt. And rock on, Dr. Doug Stein...17,000 vasectomies is quite a record, no matter how you slice it.

A pinch of Salt: Life imitates art in Colorado Springs, Colorado

 "White Chevy, Red Trailer" by the great John Salt, 1975, airbrushed acrylic on canvas.

 "Purple Impala", John Salt, 1973

 "Pioneer Pontiac", John Salt, 1971. These paintings are ©John Salt.

And now, my homage to the master:

"Blue and White Ford Wagon in Field"

John Salt (1937-) is an English painter who hit it big in the early 1970s with his photo-realistic paintings of decaying automobiles rotting away in fields, trailer parks and urban streets. His paintings have always spoken to me, not only for their magnificent technical craft but also for the mundane and poetically lonesome vibe they send out, depicting once-gleaming possessions of pride and status, now pathetically discarded and left to rot among weeds and debris. As I gaze out the window on long road trips, I'll often think to myself, "there's a John Salt painting". One of the most spectacular John Salt moments I've encountered happened at a campground in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The wonderfully eccentric May Museum of Natural History in The Tropics, which we've blogged about before, is on the property, and off in the distance among the Colorado pines and tall grass sits a comatose 1959 Ford Country Sedan station wagon. I actually remembered seeing this sad beauty on a previous road trip to the museum nine years earlier and was delighted to see that it was still resting in its same spot, full of melancholy ambiance.

If you're ever in the Colorado Springs area, Mr. Salt, your chariot awaits.  (Check out a nice video about the great artist here)

Spare time: Bowling signs seen along the way

These old signs strike my fancy, are right up my alley, are neat as a pin, are a trip down memory lane, put me in a good frame of mind, are a gutter delight and are in a league all their own.

Long live decay

My blogging friend Jeffery Blackwell at Rubber@Road recently posted some beautiful pictures he shot of a rotting Mercury which reminded me of how much I love pictures of things in a state of decay. Without even trying, once gleaming signs and objects of hope and opulence are now symbols of pity, melancholy and irony. One man's eyesore is another's photo op.