History Lesson
Old Highway Notes noun 1. Road travel journal entries from long ago. 2. A fictional elderly man named "Highway Notes" 3.Reports on long established transportation corridors. 4.Music related to geographic themes. 5. Music from residents of communities that have historic thoroughfares. 6. A defunct blogspot blog 7. Neocities site that features a unique style of chose your own adventure virtual video road trips.
Old Highway Notes began as an idea.
I was curious about how music styles changed from region to region around the world. I tried Radio Garden as a tool for this exploration. Sadly, it didn't quite work.
Radio Garden is a great tool. The tool just didn't quite fit the job. A lot of radio is controlled by a relatively small group of corporations. As a result most radio is more global, or at least national than locally oriented programming.
Since I couldn't find what I was looking for online. I realized I would have to DIY something myself. My first attempt was a blog. Here it is:
My Blog
I learned a lot blogging. The research and writing got to be too much to keep up with. In the end, I let the blog grind to a stop.
I thought creating the blog would be the site I imagined. Turns out a blog wasnt the right design and it never really matched my vision.
Even before blogging, I had been making city playlists to watch as wallpaper on my tv while listening to music. As the blog faded into oblivian, my passion for video exploration blossomed. I began to map my finds on google maps in a more organized way to stand alone with out all the writing involved in blogging.I had accidentally created a really interesting way of armchair exploring!
That was it!
Eventually, my catalog of YouTube playlists and the maps to go with them had gotten so big they needed a real home online - this is that home.
I have moved my maps from Googles My Maps to an open source provider.
I built this website.
I plan to continue to expand resources for map waypoints using other materials from the web. The old maps, shown below, are rough. The plan is to rebuild them using the thematic cross searching I developed. Over the years, I refined my searches and methods to create what I think is a very interesting travel journal, perfect for someone whose mobility or time restraints prevent actual travel to the places I map.