A friend sent me an Instagram reel the other day about how you can tell which side of the highway you are on just from the signs. It is a small thing, but it stuck with me, and the two of us ended up going back and forth about it for a while.

What it reminded me of was junior high geography. We had a whole unit on maps that year. How to fold one, how to read one, how to work out where you were and how to get where you were going, and a good bit about how the road system in this country is put together. I already knew the reading part from Scouts, so that piece came easy. The rest of it did not. I had never once thought about why the signs are the colors they are, or why the roads are numbered the way they are, and it turned out there were reasons behind all of it.