What!? Has he never visited South of the Border?

“This little guy [I-73] sees itself, someday — way over a unicorn-filled rainbow in the distant future — as a direct connection between Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to the South Carolina Coast. For now it’s the country’s least busy interstate, a wee 77-mile heart line to Andre the Giant’s last home in Ellerbe, North Carolina.”

— From “The U.S. Interstate Highways, Ranked” at MapQuest (Feb. 20)

Stipulating that “ranking the Lower 48’s two-digit, primary Interstates — 66 in all… is a subjective business,” Robert Reid takes into consideration not only “vehicle travel miles per mile of Interstate,” but also “the general joy of the ride as a whole.”

North Carolina’s Interstates fall in the middle of Reid’s pack, except for the one that no traveler of the coastal plain will be surprised to see ranked No. 66. (But that doesn’t mean it lacks excitement!)

 

Wrestlers gather to remember the biggest of them all

On this day in 1993: Hulk Hogan and other professional wrestlers convene in Ellerbe to scatter the ashes of “Andre the Giant” Roussimoff, perhaps the best-known wrestler in the world, at Roussimoff’s 200-acre ranch.

Four weeks earlier Roussimoff, 46, died of a heart attack while in Paris for his father’s funeral. The French-born Roussimoff, who stood 6 feet 10 and weighed 550 pounds, suffered from acromegaly, a growth-hormone disorder marked by progressive enlargement of the head, hands, feet and chest. In addition to wrestling, Roussimoff played the gentle giant Fezzick in the critically praised 1989 movie “The Princess Bride.”