In this episode, Scot tries to convince a friend to chase down a perfect drive on the perfect stretch of road, and things don't go completely according to plan.  

Even if you don't know this stretch of road yourself, I hope this episode brings you fond memories of whichever stretches of road are your own pieces of perfection. 

Here's a link to the Google Maps Streetview to at the starting point and you can navigate down it yourself:

Google Maps Link to K-10 and I-435

Today's music courtesy:

Ryan Branflake -  https://www.fiverr.com/nickwoott

Captain Creamsicle -  https://www.fiverr.com/capncreamsicle

Relaxo Beats -  https://www.fiverr.com/relaxo_beats

Desparee –  https://www.fiverr.com/desparee 

Handanu -  https://www.fiverr.com/handanu 

Aandy Valentine -  https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine 

 

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AI Generated Transcript:

Speaker 1: <time>0:22 </time>

Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen, and this is a podcast where I will catalog some of the perfect pieces of life, one by one. Join me each episode as I examine something that I or someone else considers perfect. When you start driving, everything is exciting, everything is new and you want to take it all in. You're still getting the feel of being behind the wheel, and even running errands is awesome. Fast forward a few years and everything is a lot more dulled down. Your body can practically drive on muscle memory a lot of times and you know instinctively how hard to crank the wheel or push the gas when you need your car to move the way you are wanting it to go. After this point, you can drive places in almost a trance at times, but every so often you get to a part of the road that wakes you out of that state for a minute and invites you to be present. Instead, it could be a new sight or some accident, or even just the road itself, if you happen to be upon a specially nice stretch of it. That's what today's episode is about that perfect stretch of road. I grew up in Olathe, kansas, a suburb about 30 or 40 minutes from Kansas City. You can get your permit at age 14 in Kansas and when I got my permit I was driving everywhere my parents would let me, with one of them sitting in the passenger seat. When I got my full license at age 16, I started driving to work in school, but I would often take the long way home or just go out and drive to thank, crisscrossing major streets and highways and exploring new roads and unfamiliar exits. This is still how I sort of get my bearings in a new city. If I'm going to be there for an extended time, head out for a drive and find my way down roads. I've never been down before. I don't remember when this was, but at one point in time I was switching from one highway to another in a direction. I rarely had a reason to go and I took notice of this ramp being particularly nice. I made a mental note and, even though it was a route I didn't travel often, I made my way back to it and tried the interchange again pretty quickly. I noticed that it felt particularly nice to drive that short stretch of road. I would make more reasons to travel that way and hit up the interchange whenever I was even nearish, which wasn't often, but often enough I started to anticipate getting to just drive this quick run of asphalt, the way you do when you know you're going to have something you love for dinner. It's the perfect stretch of road and I haven't driven on it in 13 years. If you hit it just right, going the right speed and without traffic, you start to notice this pleasant gliding sensation and I swear, for a second or two it feels like you're weightless. Over and over again, the same conditions produce the same results. When I say without traffic, I'm saying the ideal condition was zero other cars, no one else to monitor or adjust speed, based on just open road. But in Kansas that may be easier to come by than you might be thinking. I remember slowing down a mile before this interchange at times, just to put enough space between my car and the one car on the highway in front of me. I refined the experience more and more. Let me stress it was never bad. It was always uncommonly nice, but over time I developed some rules to make it optimal. I'll list them in a bit, but follow these instructions do it when there are no other cars and you have a perfect experience on demand for whenever you need it. So what is this perfect interchange then? Well, it's in the episode title, so I'm probably not keeping you in suspense, but it starts on highway K-10. K-10 is an east-west state highway for Kansas. That's where the K comes from, and it goes from Lawrence, kansas, on the west end, and merges into Interstate 435 over Nolathe, kansas, on the east end. This is the end on which I want to focus. When you're traveling east on K-10 and you reach I-435, you have to pick whether to go east or north. It's east slash north rather than east slash west or north slash south, because I-435 is a beltway, a highway that makes a large 83 mile loop all the way around Kansas City like a moat. So when you enter the corner as K-10 does, you wind up with the options of east or north. This might be a good point to jump out of my narrative and talk about highways just for a second. I knew some of this, but I filled in my knowledge gaps from various Wikipedia articles. So in the United States, we number the interstates in a certain order. They start with Interstate 1 on the west coast of California and increase in number as they go east. They all have either a one-digit or two-digit number. The interstates that run north to south are all odd numbers. The even numbers are used on east to west interstates. Those start with the lowest numbers in the south and the numbers get higher as you travel north. Main should have all the highest interstate numbers overall and Arizona should have the lowest Branching off from these main interstate routes are different types of bypasses, beltways and spurs. Spurs are routes that only attach to the main highway by one point, so, like an offshoot, bypasses connect at two points, so they become an alternate route for a stretch. Beltways or loops also connect at two points to the main highway but, unlike a bypass, they make an entire loop around. These routes all have three-digit numbers, with the first digit being odd on spur routes and even on bypasses and beltways. Is that interesting to anyone else? Where I grew up there was an I-35, a 435, 635, an I-70, 470, 670. I always wanted to know the rules about why they numbered them the way they did, so it's interesting to me. Back to my perfect stretch of road, I figured the easiest way to check it out again after so long was to take a trip there via Google Maps Street View feature and, after a bit of time getting reacquainted with how to move around in the map. I was off there we go lots of nice cut rock on the side, but prairie, good clouds on this Google image. Now I get to the part where I have to choose between 435 North or I-35 to Wichita and Des Moines. I-35 is the way I would normally go. 435 North is the way I don't normally go, but that is what we're looking for actually, alright. So as I pick 435 North, I'm entering the ramp I'm talking about, and it looks like the Google car might have a wide, open road for this. So here's what I'm noticing this road kind of tilts up as it turns left. The right side tilts up kind of like a racetrack. I mean, that's not too abnormal, but I remember it. Just, it also slides to the left as it goes. You get this great effect, alright, so Alright. And then here's the part where it curves in and finally where other people start to merge in with it, and then you're on 435, headed North. It looks like it's still there. On Google Maps it looks like it's still the same. I guess that's what we're going to see. Since it looked like everything was all good on the Google Maps, I decided the next step was to reach out to someone local. Even though I haven't lived in Kansas since 2003, I have many friends who still do, and this is where my friend Danny comes into the story.

Speaker 2: <time>8:44 </time>

Hello.

Speaker 1: <time>8:45 </time>

Hello Danny. We've known each other since 10th grade. He was with me, in fact, for the Billy's Balloon experience from episode 1. He's been a good friend from way back and I figured now was the time to see if I could trade on any of that for a favor. So hey, buddy, you're my big interview for this episode.

Speaker 2: <time>9:06 </time>

All right, all right, lucky me, I guess.

Speaker 1: <time>9:10 </time>

So I was going to ask if you'd be willing to drive over a stretch of road near you that I remember being perfect and then report back to me after you've done it. Does that sound like somethi