It makes my day when I am traveling down a rural, two-lane highway and my GPS says: ‘In eighteen miles turn right on Main Street.’

What it means is that after 18 miles of pleasant driving past farm fields and forests I will enter yet another small town and turn right on yet another Main Street.

If I plan the route well and let the GPS do its magic on the ‘shortest distance’ setting, I can have a whole afternoon of such driving, including stops at promising looking junk/antique shops and other quirky places.

It’s far easier than plotting a ‘blue line’ journey on a paper map. I encountered many Main Streets on a recent jaunt through western Massachusetts. Below are a couple of them.

The shot below, taken in New Hampshire, offers a more extreme example of what can happen when following the directions of a GPS set to ‘shortest distance.’