The interstate at our front door

Happy Tuesday!

We’re going to have a little good-natured fun today, courtesy of our friends at the Florida Department of Transportation.

Notice the “Interstate 41” sign in our photo today? Kinda weird, right?

I saw a similar photo over the weekend, and figured it was a joke or AI. The sign supposedly sat at the corner of U.S. 41 and State Road 200 in Hernando, but anyone could see that it’s fake.

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Except, it’s not. And thus starts our story.

I’m the kind of guy who notices stuff out of place. Maybe that’s the reporter in me, but my eye is always drawn to something that doesn’t belong, and if it’s interesting enough, I won’t let it go until I know how/why it’s there.

So, when an interstate sign shows up in Citrus County, I gotta go check it out.

And there it is. I drove to Hernando on Sunday for my photo, and I must say, it’s a jarring sight. The state has some road work planned this week at that busy intersection, and someone decided it’s OK to slip us an “Interstate 41” sign in the hopes no one would notice.

We noticed.

It’s clearly a doctored I-4 sign. FDOT spokeswoman Kris Carson, a rock star in this business and a first ballot inductee into the Lindsay Blair PIO Hall of Fame, said no one has a clue how the sign got there.

“Not the contractor. We already asked them,” she said.

Even the signposts are not standard FDOT equipment. It’s as if someone just showed up one night and planted a bunch of goofy highway signs in our community.

The road work is fairly simple. Workers are widening the S.R. 200 southbound turn lane to improve the turning radius onto U.S. 41. The intersection will also be repaved. The $501,000 project is scheduled for this week.

Gotta say, I find it a little…um…odd that the state wouldn’t know how an interstate road sign ended up on a Citrus County road project, 100 miles from the interstate. And it's not like a one-hit error. There's an identical sign on the north end of the project.

Me…I’m curious as heck. I mean, someone knew exactly what he/she was doing.

I imagine the conversation went something like this:

Fred: “Did you bring the U.S. 41 signs?”

Joe: “I thought you were bringing them.”

Fred: “You dummy! How are we going to mark the detour?”

(Thinking.)

Joe: “OK, an idea, but it’s a little crazy. You know those I-4 signs in the pickup from last week’s work in Orlando? Well, they already have a 4 on them…we could, um, you know…”

And that’s how we end up with “Interstate 41” signs in Hernando.

We’re just having a little chuckle today. Always appreciative of the work FDOT does in Citrus County. And I can’t expect folks in Tampa to have detailed knowledge of an intersection improvement in little ol’ Hernando.

Kris said FDOT will remove the Interstate 41 signs and replace them with real ones that depict the actual roadway. The mystery of how they got there remains unsolved.

We needed a smile to start the week. Thanks to the freeway, we got one.

Safe travels today, friends.

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