This is my bit of a blog. Rambling words about rambling days. No focus and nothing ambitious. I seem to write most about local color, nature, and animals, and there is an incomplete chunk about my road trips of 2011.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Sentry Posts, Solved

This is an update to my previous blog post regarding apparent sentry posts I've been seeing along the roads around here. My best guess was that these were garbage shelters. Which guess I made on seeing garbage cans in some of them - and one marked, even, with quite a fancy wood cut sign reading "Garbage."

However, lots of things still didn't add up. Why would so many people go to such length to shelter garbage? And why make the shelters tall enough for a man, rather than wide enough for a couple of garbage cans?

Well, now, I have been informed, by no fewer than three people, what these sentry post/garbage shelters really are: school bus stops. Ah-ha! This does make sense. And it is endearing that the parents of West Virginia would take the trouble to shelter their children thus.

However it raises all sorts of other, urgent questions. Such as, why have I never seen school bus stop shelters anywhere else ever?  Or even just in New Jersey?  New Jersey winters are harsher than winters here (though less snowy).  And New Jersey does have some areas of long driveways, where there is no possibility of running out the house door as the bus approaches.

Perhaps schools here are more consolidated. This could make bus routes longer and timeliness and wait time less predictable, especially in inclement weather.  Or maybe New Jersey children are just hardier.  Or their parents care about them less.  ;)

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