Took 3 weeks to find a blog that tracks old gas station maps

I was trying to find vintage highway maps for a road trip I'm planning from Tucson to Santa Fe, and every search kept giving me museum sites or eBay listings. After 3 weeks of digging through random link lists, I stumbled on a tiny blog run by a retired oil company draftsman who scans his own collection, about 40 posts total. It had a 1967 route map with notes on which gas stations closed down, which was exactly what I needed for my detour stops. Has anyone else found a niche blog that solved a weirdly specific problem like this?

1 comments

1 Comment

butler.shane26d ago

...and that reminds me of the time I spent a whole weekend hunting for a blog that just documented old drive-in theater speaker poles, the kind they used to mount on wooden posts before they all went to the metal stands. My wife thought I was crazy, but I needed to know what the standard paint colors were for a specific brand from the early 70s because I was restoring one for my backyard. Turns out there's this guy in Ohio who collects them and photographs every single one he finds, and he had a post about the exact factory shade of blue I was looking for. He even had a scanned brochure from the manufacturer that showed the color swatch, which was way more than I ever expected to find. That blog is still one of my favorite bookmarks, even though I only ever needed it for that one project. Weird how a random obsession can lead you to the exact right person who gets it.