Highways

Highways criss and cross all over the United States. The general rule of thumb is that odd-numbered interstates go North/South, and even-numbered interstates go East/West. They're usually marked that way, even if sometimes (shoutout to Spartanburg, SC) the roads get a bit diverted by the mountains and the east/west highway is running due north/south, and i85 N is in fact heading east-southeast and vice versa.

The point to be found here is, if you got to a location by road, you can get out again by road. Highways go places. Different highways go different places. Use this.

Yes, highways are scary. They go fast. Sometimes they're stopped full of traffic (we'll go over this later). They're also the single best way to get anywhere if you don't know exactly what you're doing; covered in useful signage, resources like gas and food, and almost guaranteed to be pointing at some kind of population center.




Finding a Highway


Highways are usually well marked. Look for any sign pointing to an interstate. Follow the signs to the interstate, and see where it's going. If it's not somewhere you want to go, follow it anyway until it points at somewhere on the way to somewhere you want to go.

Some highways are Interstate Highways, usually marked with an i or a shield-icon sign. Other highways are State Highways marked with the shape or shorthand of a state, which may vary by state. In this guide, they will be differentiated with letters; i85 and GA11 for example (Interstate 85 and Georgia 11).




Boundary Highways

99.9999% of the time, anywhere that you are has a series of intersecting highways that bound it. In an ideal world, these would be four highways running along the north, south, east, and west sides of a nice, even box. In the real world, there are mountains, and your local boundary highways may number themselves oddly.

Before ever leaving home, decide your boundary highways for home. They should have numbers and signs with that number on them, and connect to each other all the way around. This acts a boundary, thus the name. If you started at home, and have not crossed any of these highways, you can still find home again. When I was learning to drive at home with my mother, my boundary highways were i85, i26, SC11, and SC14; I was not to cross them, and was repeatedly drilled on how to get home from various points on them. Do this with your own boundary highways.

Boundary highways do not stop existing when they cross other boundary highways. Even if you are outside the safe zone, if you have a base knowledge of which compass direction you are from home, and which compass direction the highway follows, you can find these boundary highways in the wild and follow them towards a more familiar setting, and eventually home.




Using Highways to Travel

Highways more often than not lead to other highways. You can safely travel remarkable amounts of distance by studying ahead of time which highways go medium-nearby to where you want to go. Sometimes there are multiple reasonable options for how to do this - that's a feature, not a bug. Visiting relatives for Christmas in Columbus, OH from growing up in Spartanburg, SC; my parents never used even a map. They knew the way from home to i85, and then took i85N to Charlotte; i77N through four states to Cambridge, OH; and i70W from Cambridge to Columbus, at which point my father (the one with Ohio relatives) took over for the final half-dozen turns to get to the house he'd grown up in, memorized forty years previously. Similarly, to visit friends who have moved to Louisville, KY from Columbia, SC; i26W to Asheville, i40W to Knoxville, i75N to Lexington, and i64W to Louisville - just asking ahead of time which exit to take to get to their new apartment.

Highways are more "risky" in the sense of getting lost in local usage than they are for long-haul trips, and the most common mistakes are getting on them going the wrong direction, or taking the exit next to the exit you meant to take. That's just part of life, really - correct course, and move on. Ideally you'll live somewhere long enough to figure out the main arteries of the local roadworks, to the point that "behind the Laurens Road McDonalds" is a complete and useful set of directions.




Avoiding Highways

Even if a highway is blocked, they can be used to navigate. Remember all those JCT signs? Don't take them. Just keep looking for more, in such a way as to travel parallel to the interstate. This is a tricky move, not for beginners, but is very possible.

Sometimes, if a highway has become inaccessible for reasons of damage rather than traffic, someone useful will install Detour signs. Follow those signs to get exactly where you wanted to go, just by a different way. Even if it is for traffic reasons, sometimes the signs will be marked Bypass, and is useful in the same capacity.