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COPYRIGHT 2004 Ehlert Publishing Group
A few years ago I was traveling around in Baja California with a couple of friends, and according to one map I had, there was a remote valley that looked like fun. A dirt road came in from the west, and the map showed parallel dotted lines going out to the south.
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We rode down on a very rough, little-used road, and in the middle of the valley floor it just seemed to end, with a few cow trails leading off into the brush. It began to drizzle. As I was looking at the map, and my companions were discussing why they had ever let me con them into this, a vaquero rode up on his horse. In my stuttering Spanish I asked him about the road to the south. He looked at the motorcycles and shook his head, saying only a horse could get out that way; we would have to leave by the same road we came in on. We did.
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Wheels are good, but they generally require at least rudimentary roads in order to go any real distance. The first road for wheeled traffic was built more than 5,000 years ago, in what is now Iraq. Archeologists found the remains of a two-wheeled chariot near ancient Babylon which they carbondated to 3200 B.C., and the presumption was that if you had a hot-rod chariot, you had to have a road so you could go exceed the speed limit.
Today we tend to take roads for granted, although they are an essential, and often expensive, part of any nation's infrastructure. The very first roads may have...
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