> A number of years ago, they built a beltway all the way around the city. Then, as so often happens, the city moved out past the beltway so that now you must drive miles and miles just to get to it. One solution is to build another concentric beltway, but that is big bucks.

I love cities like that. They look great on road maps. A lot of cities in the midwest and sort-of-east look like dots with loops around them on maps. Some have more than one concentric circle. Boston's on the coast, so it doesn't have full circles around it, but it has both an inner and an outer loop: I-95 goes around the city of Boston, while I-495 goes around the city and its suburbs as well.

> Besides, Atlanta would soon engulf that one as well.

I read somewhere that Atlanta is currently the fastest growing American city. It blows my mind that Georgia, of all states, would have not only such a fast-growing city but one with such a high crime rate, too. Atlanta's felony rate (adjusted for its population) exceeds that of New York City, Washington DC, New Orleans, and other cities known for their crime rates, and by a huge margin besides. Why does this seem strange to me? Because almost anywhere else you go in Georgia, you're in the country, sometimes so far in the country that no town has even claimed the land, which is common enough in the west but unusual in the east. The few people you see are the most laid back imaginable. This has been my experience, at least. So I have a hard time reconciling the fact that such a messy city as Atlanta is plunked right in the middle of all that.

> Have you driven from Washington D.C. to New York to Boston lately? How much time did you spend out in the country?

As you know, I-95 connects these cities by way of Baltimore and Philadelphia as well. It's a fast route to drive at night, when there are no commuters, but there's a good reason why, when we drove from Boston to DC for the first RinkUnion, we took I-84 from Connecticut west to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, then I-80 / I-81 south through Maryland. Going that way, it's practically nothing BUT country and small towns, even the New York part.

What I'm saying is, with New England's famed autumn foliage coming up early next month and such a beautiful drive up here beckoning, it seems a really good time to take another trip to New England, doesn't it?

I'm not hinting or anything.