Today I got my new Iowa Driver's License. And it only took 30 minutes, too!
Of course, they hid the place in an out-of-the-way strip mall on the far side of Cedar Rapids. They're lucky I'm good at finding places now. Which is not always an easy task, here, let me tell you. Allow me to digress a minute...
...when you first unfold one of those large city maps that show every street, are impossible to fold back up, and the local Walmart charges you an astronomical price for, you look it and think to yourself: "How hard can this be? Sure, there are a lot of streets, but about half of them seem pretty straight, and this being Iowa, we don't have the everpresent loop-of-highway-around-the-town. There's one big highway that goes through it, and another that crosses it at about the middle. Sort of. Easy, no?"
No. Allow me to give you a small example. The library, according to all the vast resources at my disposal, is on 1st St. SE. Watch out for that little SE. It's important. See, Cedar Rapids is divided into four 'quadrants' by US 380 and the Cedar River. And because of this fact, most streets have NW, NE, SW, or SE after their names. Some of the big ones get away with just W or E. But that's beside the point. Because these streets have these extra identifiers, someone, in their infinite wisdom, said:
"Let's name streets running parallel to the river the same thing on both sides! 1st Streets next to the river on either side, and moving out from that! It'll be cool! And then we can have number avenues running perpendicular to the river! In fact, we can pull this trick lots of places!"
End result: There are two completely different 1st Streets in Cedar Rapids, and 1st Avenue intersects them both. And we're not even going to hit the multiple repetitions of letter-named-streets/avenues, or the fact that Edgewood Parkway runs roughly parallel to Edgewood Road. For all of its very short existence.
Yep. The road planner(s) should be shot.
But all in all, it's not too bad of a little city. I got my driver's license after only a half-hour, and it would have been shorter had the guy not mistyped my address three times. And then had to start all over.
Besides. There's a IMAX theater. And I rather suspect they'll be showing Batman Begins when it comes out.
*crosses fingers*
Posted by Ardith at June 2, 2005 10:50 PM | TrackBack