You can’t really have a relationship with a road, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I have had a long standing relationship with the New Jersey Turnpike.  Even reading that sentence sounds weird, but let’s see where this takes us.

I don’t have as distinct memories from any other road like the New Jersey turnpike.  There is a stretch of the turnpike that holds particular significance to me, personally and photographically.  Yeah, I realize how weird all of this sounds.  I remember a great summer’s journey undertaken with some friends down the pike to see some horrible band in Asbury Park.  Later that same summer I would depart for my term abroad from Newark airport and then the pike was the first thing I saw when I returned to United States after what turned out to be a life changing experience.

Recently, I’ve been playing around in my mind with the notion that what we see is affected by our emotions.  How we see a place is affected by the emotional experiences we’ve had there.  A place could be beautiful, but if your memories from there are terrible that can take away from the attractiveness of a place.  Whether I like it or not, the turnpike kind of represents that to me.

Let’s take a look inside my brain and the views from that pike of ours: