transport: road signs

When my mom was young her and her family would always go camping and pass signs that said "falling rock." My grandfather told my mother and her siblings that falling rock was the ghost of an indian princess and if you looked real close maybe you could find her. My mom believed this up to the age of 17. Until one day when she was driving with some of her friends and started to tell everyone to look for falling rock.

Everyday when riding the bus I would wonder how many miles we had to travel. I asked my mom to explain this to me, she said that a mile was a measure of distance. So I said ok and went on with that. Later on I thought that a mile was the distance between 2 road signs.

Like some others, the "No Passing" signs were confusing to me as a kid.

I thought you weren't supposed to pass that point.

Also, the "Pass with Care" signs... I thought those meant that you had to be careful because there was something really important there. Though I never really saw anything very valuable in those spots, I figured that there had to be something there. I guess I thought that the rest of the time you could drive recklessly because there was nothing important around to hit. Good thing I no longer thought this stuff when I got my license.

You know those signs that appear 10 meters before the turning? When I was little I thought that you had to turn exactly where the sign was - only there never seemed to be a road!

When I was little, whenever we seemed to pass a "do not pass" sign, we were near a wooded area. So I always believed that those signs were telling people that they couldn't enter the "forest". And when we passed a sign that said passing was okay, it was alright to enter the "forest".

I was out for a drive with my dad one day, and I asked him what the blue roadsign with a "P" in it meant. He explained to me that it meant "somewhere you could stop your car and go for a pee." From that point on I had the notion that car parks, no matter what the size, existed solely so that people could go to the loo.

I also made sure I went to the toilet whenever we parked the car in a car park, so the police wouldn't arrest us for misusing it.

We took road trips a lot when I was younger. I always looked out the windows and read thigns as we drove. I used to think that the signs "do not pass" and"pass with care" meant that we literally couldn't drive down that part of the road. I used to taunt the signs sticking my toungue out as mom or dad drove by them!!! It wasn't until my oldest sister started driver's training that I finally figured out what they meant!

In Alberta, on country roads, the roads lie on a grid. the east-west roads are abbreviated as TWP (township) and the north-south roads are abbreviated as RGE (range). I naturally assumed that they stood for twerp and ridge, respectively.

I am from an area that doesn't get snow but does get lots of seasonal frost and ice. All the bridges have signs posted that say "bridge may ice in cold weather." Until I was fifteen, I used to wonder why every bridge in town was called "may ice," but only when it was cold.

i used to believe that signs on the street that read "pedestrian crossing" meant that only people of a certain religion could cross the street at that particular place.

I used to think that a sign saying "Dead slow" meant that you had to drive fast. I thought that the sign was asking you to act as if slowness was dead or didn't exist, i.e. drive fast!

When I was young, I believed that all of the lines on the roads were painted by one man with a wide paint brush. I imagined that he must have had a little wagon which carried his paint can and ruler. Since I lived in West Texas at the time, and traveled to visit my grandparents in the mountains of Colorado, I thought that was the loneliest and most dangerous of jobs.

For the longest time I thought the "Exit Only" mention on the exit ramp sign on the highway meant you couldn't get back onto the highway from that exit.......the longest time.

I used to believe that the "watch for fallen rock" signs were about an old indian chief who got lost from his tribe and when we were driving through those fallen rock zones we had to look for him....Lee Rose Kentucky

I used to believe that "DEAD END: signs meaned it was the end of the world and you would fall off completely

In South Dakota, (coyote and sunshine state) when you go by a historical marker there is a picture of a sun, and a coyote on the back. One day my grandmother said look, there is a sun-dog...referring to the sky and the ring around the sun...and we just happened to be going by one of those signs. So for a long time, I believed that when you go by one of those signs....look up!