Tuesday, March 27

Road naming process initiated

We drove to the really nice planning building in the county seat to submit our proposed name for our road. We dealt with very nice people and filled out forms and wrote a couple of checks and smiled and everything is just ducky. When we go back to pick up the fresh brand new road signs, we will have to bring along a red flag to attach to the 12-foot-long post on which the two road signs we are buying will sit. (We opted to install the road signs ourselves.) The red flag warns other motorists to stay away from the pole which will stick at least six feet out behind the bed of the pickup truck as we haul our brand new shiny road name signs up the hill to be installed at the intersection of the old, named road, and our shiny newly-named road.

To celebrate, we ordered a pizza and bought a six-pack of really good handmade ale to take home.

Not counting pizza and beer and gasoline and our time, naming our road has so far cost about $250.

4 comments:

HHhorses said...

So is our address no longer 42999 Rd 810?

Tom Hurley said...

I'm not sure it ever really was. Besides the new house is a whole mile down the road.

Pete S. said...

How are numbers assigned to the dwellings along the road? Do you decide or is there an official formula?

Tom Hurley said...

Street numbers are expressed as miles and thousandths of a mile from a designated central point, often the courthouse or city hall of a county seat. Measuring from our nearest neighbor's number, we figure that ours will be 42501. That's forty-two and a half miles from whatever the starting point is. Odd numbers are on the east side of the road in our case.

When I went to the Fresno County Planning Commission a few decades ago to get addresses for our Florence Lake place and the high ranch, we pored over the maps and guessed at the distances. We ended the Florence address in a 7 because that was a favorite number of Karla's. The ranch's number ended in 95 because it was the furthest of the three private land addresses up there. It turns out both numbers are off by about three miles, due to the County's mis-measuring the length of the Kaiser Pass Road. But nobody cares so the numbers will stick.