“Every once in a while, people need to be in the presence of things that are really far away”*…
The temperature was hovering in the mid teens outside when we all made our way down to the continental breakfast that occupies the lobby of every roadside motel in America. There was a couple hovering over watered down coffee and self-made waffles when my dad proffered information about our morning: “We’re on our way to the McFarthest Spot!”, as if fully expecting them to smile and say back “Oh, what fun!” Instead, we were met with blank stares and an uncaffeinated “what?”
The McFarthest spot, of course, is the point in the contiguous United States that is furthest away from any McDonald’s restaurant. A brilliant (if eccentric) man named Stephen Von Worley determined it to be in the middle of nowhere in South Dakota some years back. A twist of fate, unsurprising to any resident of Tonopah, led to their McDonald’s closing and moving the coordinates some. Recalculating the location of the Spot with the newly closed restaurant absent from the dataset pushed our beacon of hope west.
The Spot now lies on some BLM land in the middle of Nevada, just northwest of Groom Lake – better known as Area 51. It’s just over 120 miles as the crow flies to the nearest Big Mac, even more if you account for driving miles. It seems to me oddly far, but also strikingly close given the magnitude of the 3.1 million square miles we in the US have between Canada and Mexico…
Tag along on “A Visit to the McFarthest Spot.”
* Ian Frazier
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As we dally at a distance, we might note that to day is April Fool’s Day. A popular occasion for gags and hoaxes since the 19th century, it is considered by some to date from the calendar change of 1750-52— though references to high jinx on the 1st of April date back to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1392).
April Fools’ Day is not a public holiday in any country… though perhaps it should be.
The McFarthest entry above is not a gag. Nor is your correspondent’s suggestion for an April Fools smile: this ad (via the Minnesota Historical Society) for a Bobcat loader: Bobcat A Go-Go.
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