BROTHER ROAD: Part 2 of 2; Booming along the great American interstate highway network.(News)

Byline: KEVIN A. WILSON

Travel averaging at least a mile a minute became a national expectation as well. I was in elementary school when my folks moved to the suburbs. That was before the interstates got there, but by the time I was in high school there was an interstate under construction within two miles of our home.

When I first went to college the drive was 12 hours one way-about half the distance of it was on interstate, though that was only one-third of the time spent. The drive would have easily been a couple of hours longer, perhaps requiring an overnight stay without I-75, and my choice was influenced by the notion I was "only'' a day's drive away (600 miles though it was). This was the early '70s, when boomers and their Brother Road were entering their 20s.

It was 1987 when I first made good use of the system to travel far and relatively quickly. Conveying a then-new Jaguar XJ6 from Tucson, Arizona, to Detroit, my wife and I made an ill-advised decision to try coming up through Denver; ill-advised, because it was March. It still snows in March.

I-80 and I-90 were closed for days. We had a schedule to meet, children staying with grandparents who needed to go to work on Monday. There was nothing to do but head back south on I-25 (cutting the corner across northeastern New Mexico on two-lanes) and across I-40 to Tulsa. It was just over 1000 miles by the odometer. Then onto I-44, I-70, I-69, I-94 and home, which lay another 990 miles beyond.

One ticket for 25 mph over the limit (on the interstate in New Mexico; it cost $10), two days and we were home... the bed didn't stop moving for hours and no, we didn't see much of America outside of truck stops. But we made our schedule, which couldn't have happened on the old Mother Road.

By the late 1980s the interstate network was moving from its construction phase into an era of maintenance and minor expansion. The original 40,000-mile network plus most of the additional, subsequently authorized 6000 miles had been completed.