Alphabet Soup: Why Wisconsin’s County Highways Are Lettered, Not Numbered

Only one highway traversed the Canadian Gorge, a state road that ran from the town of Wagon Mound to the village of Roy. A tangle of canyons and mesas, the gorge dropped off the high plains of northeastern New Mexico into breaks over a thousand feet deep in places. Cut by rivers and streams, most of the Canadian was remote and wild, virtually empty

This can seem frustrating (there simply are diagonal highways in Chicago) but the point is to shed light on something rather than to model it precisely.

Sophie had chosen a road that bisected flat, immaculate countryside, with ruler-straight lines of vines running off to the horizon. There were châteaus to the left of them, châteaus to the right: Léoville Barton, Latour, Pichon-Lalande, Lynch-Bages, Pontet-Canet. Sam felt as though they were driving through a top-class wine list.