Monday through Wednesday of this week found me just north of Boston in Danvers, MA teaching. I had heard people talk about the roads in Boston. However, what the roads and driving in Boston truly embody, this is something only fully understood through first person experience.

One rumor was immediately apparent. Yes, the only explanation for the layout of the roads is old cow paths were merely paved over to create the transportation network in Boston. Apparently the bovine was the most intelligent creature in the area, even more intelligent than the inhabiting humans, as they decided how the roads were laid out. Humans in the area simply followed Victorian cows, and as a result so we still following the wanderings of Victorian cows.

Since these paths have no real organized pattern, road intersections are equally as creative. Stop signs, yeids signs and stoplights are liberally placed throughout tangles of intersecting streets. Most intersections closely resemble what would happen if a plate of spaghetti were thrown across the room onto the floor, intersections of indeterminate numbers of streets coming in and departing from all sorts of obtuse angles.

Streets wandering aimlessly through an urban landscape randomly colliding in free form intersections, to a visitor like myself, this mess is somewhat confusing and there most definitely were moments were I was driving like I was lost, BECAUSE I WAS! Apparently even the result of this tangled mess is not only does it succeed in confounding visitors like myself, it apparently completely confuses everybody who lives here as well. This is the only explanation for every single car on the road driving like they had absolutely no clue where the were going.

All of this because apparently the most intelligent urban planners in the area were Victorian bovines. This truly is amazing.