Reason for Road Reflectors

Did you know that there is a purpose to the little stick reflectors on the shoulder of the road? I always assumed they were more useful than counting them when I was bored as a child but I never actually realized how useful they are.

Several years ago my roommate/best friend and I decided we wanted to take a road trip during spring break. Since I was working most of the week we knew it had to be a fast trip so we decided to go see Oregon. I had never been to Oregon before and my friend told me that it was beautiful so we hopped in her car Thursday after I finished work and headed North. We didn’t have any reservations for sleeping and thought we could just pull off somewhere each night and sleep in the car with the sleeping bags we brought. As we were driving into La Grande it started to snow so we decided that a hotel wouldn’t be a bad idea after all.

The next day when we woke there were several inches of snow and we were dodging chains that had fallen off of the trucks in the road. My roommate drove all day as we saw (sort of) Mt. St. Helens and Portland. When we got to the coast my roommate had me drive over the bridge to Astoria because she wanted me to see it but didn’t like the idea of driving that close to the water. That night we were heading to Tillamook to sleep because she thought it would be fun to see the factory there. Since it was dark when we crossed over to Astoria I had no idea what the road was like along Highway 101.

I have driven canyon roads before and been fine at going 50 mph, on this road I was going 30 mph and still feeling nervous. There was a light rain and a little fog and as I made my way along the road cars would come flying out of nowhere with their high beams still on making it impossible to see the road for several seconds. I couldn’t see the road even when there wasn’t on-coming traffic and the only reason I knew when to turn was when there would be a reflector directly in front of me. I realized that I could look for the small patches of light to see which way the road was turning as I drove. My roommate helped look for them as well and we eventually made it to Tillamook. I didn’t realize how frightened I had been until I woke up the next morning and found that my jaw was sore from clenching my teeth. I am glad that I didn’t know how narrow of a shoulder there was on that road (before the long drop-off) that would have just made it that more terrifying.

Overall the trip was a lot of fun with lots of fond memories as we drove over 1,700 miles in three days.