Knowing you're odd.
And really not caring at all.
What a liberating experience that can be.
Especially when you find others who are just as weird as you. This is one of the Internet's subtle gifts.
Barb Bee couldn't believe what she was seeing three years ago as she poked around on a newsgroup. She followed the thread for miscellaneous ... transport ... roads. And there was a link to a Web site about Pennsylvania highway signs.
Bee and her husband, John, had always been fascinated by roads and maps. They'd drop everything and take a road trip to nowhere in particular for no other reason than to see what might happen.
But this was obsessive. Their kind of obsessive.
On the site, run by a man named Adam Prince, Barb Bee found a matrix of every Pennsylvania highway. All 458 state route numbers were laid out in a grid on the home page, from Route 3 near Philadelphia to Route 999 in Lancaster County.
Click on a route number and up pops a photo of one or both of that highway's ends, always including the distinctive keystone-shaped route sign with the "end" placard above it.
Some photos were posted. Many were still needed. It was a project that this Prince guy was trying to complete. He wanted to collect photos of the "end" signs and surrounding countryside or cityscape of every state route in Pennsylvania. That's 916 photos.
"I truly didn't think there were other people out there with this obsession," Bee said, remembering her amazement. "This 'I wonder what this place on the map is like. Where does this road go?'"
Prince, a 27-year-old Robert Morris University graduate and a buyer for a building supply company, moved two years ago to Raleigh, N.C. He is in on the joke: "If you can't laugh at yourself, really, who can you laugh at?"
Prince calls himself a "road geek." His obsession sprouted when he was a boy in Elizabeth, near McKeesport in western Pennsylvania's Monongahela Valley (on state Route 48, to be exact).
"Anytime my family took a little trip, I'd keep track on maps where I'd been, marking with a little blue pen," Prince said. "It's basically a natural curiosity of what's around the corner."
Barb Bee, 45, is a homemaker, and John Bee, 46, is a short-haul trucker for Pella Windows. They live near Oakdale, just beyond Pittsburgh's southwest suburbs, on state Route 978.
They are lively and funny, and they are aware of how strange they must seem to some:
"We don't really care what other people think," Barb Bee said with a laugh. "Most people try to conform and be like everyone else. We call them 'sheeple.' So, if they don't get it, fine. Just leave me alone."
There are others who do get it. Many others.
Since launching his State Ends site, Prince has attracted 46 contributors to his project, all of whom have traveled through the commonwealth to snap shots of one or both termini of state highways and e-mail them to him for posting.
What Prince has constructed amounts to a travelogue of Pennsylvania.
Many of the photos -- remote mountain ridges; lonely strips of winding, tar-patched pavement; hamlets that appear inhabited by as many bears as people -- are at turns haunting and magnificent.
Sites similar to Prince's have sprouted up around the nation. Links to nine other state ends pages, from Vermont to Georgia and including Prince's North Carolina page, are included on his site. Others have started interstate and U.S. highway pages.
The Bees, then, may be considered somewhat mainstream. Maybe.
Once, John Bee was browsing through an old atlas and noticed a town tucked in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania. The town's name: Ned.
"We had to get up right then and go see if there really was a town named Ned," he said. "I was born to drive. I love it."
According to the PA State Ends index, only seven routes remain undocumented.
Which is a lie. Prince admitted he has been sent photos of all of those route ends. He simply hasn't posted them yet.
"I haven't told people it's finished," Prince said with some sheepishness. "But it is."
In other words, on this route, the "end" placard is missing.