What's in a Name

As I approached the center of Dumfries, I searched left and right. There was no SWC300 signpost indicating which route to take. I went around the roundabout twice, then chose the likeliest exit, though I am not sure why I thought I could identify “likely” in a strange city, in a new country, with nothing but a vague sense of south and west to guide me.

My choice was wrong. I pulled into a carpark, made a U-turn, and returned the way I came, taking the next possible right-hand turn where the road forked. Finally, I was somewhat confident I was on Scotland’s Southwest Coastal 300 route.

The VisitScotland website and app had assured me the coastal route was well marked, but other than one sign pointing toward Dumfries when I exited the highway from Newcastle, there was not a sign to be seen. This was not like the SWC300’s older sibling, the North Coast 500, where every turn and segment of that route is well-signposted with a small NC500 brown sign by the roadside. Impossible to miss a turn.

The lack of wayfinding gave me pause and questions flooded in.

What makes this particular road the SWC300? Why run this invisible route line through some towns and cities but not others? What tied the experience together? On the one hand, I had the expectation that the route would be easily identifiable. On the other, I wondered what made it particularly special as I had not yet seen the coast in my time behind the wheel. I am not saying the route lacked beauty. Rather, in those first miles, the name and the road did not yet belong together.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the names we give things — roads, experiences, years of our lives — and how those names become a kind of invitation. Or a dare.

I have been on my share of named routes and themed experiences in my lifetime, with some of the most notable on this road trip. Some merely name an obvious pathway. I just completed ten days in Wales and the Cambrian and Coastal Ways of that country are just what they are labeled – the connected roads through the Cambrian Mountains and along the coast.

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Other routes have evoked stronger images and set higher expectations. The Romantische Straße in Germany promises picturesque Bavarian villages and a fairy-tale castle at its southern end. What’s not to yearn for in a Romantic Road?

And the route delivered. The Blue Car carried me from town to town, each more picturesque than the last, with medieval walls, white storks on rooftops, famous castles, and well-placed brown signs guiding the way. But even the Romantic Road is, at heart, a marketing label: a 460-kilometer-long collection of roads officially established in 1950 to boost post-war tourism and offer visitors a positive image of Germany.

In Normandy, I followed another named route, the Route du Cidre, a 40-kilometer circuit through the Pays d’Auge marked by red apple signs and linking farms and distilleries offering cider, Calvados, and pommeau tastings. It, too, was clearly a curated experience, an external label placed over something already there.

Maybe what bothered me about the missing SWC300 signs was not simply that I was lost. It was that the name had made a promise the road itself had not yet kept. And I know, from years of planning work, how much power — and risk — lives inside a name.

As a city planner, I worked with many cities and towns eager to create arts districts, public art trails, and other branded experiences to distinguish themselves from the crowd. But naming only works if the thing named can carry the promise. The Southwest Coastal 300, the Romantic Road, and the Cider Route all need enough “there there” to live up to the hype.

Sometimes these labels are an “after the fact” effort to highlight something that is truly there – like the Romantic Road or the Route du Cidre. And other times, the name is aspirational – speaking to a desire to create a new critical mass of something worthwhile. In my planning work, when clients couldn’t back up their aspirations with resources and political will, the naming almost always became a wasted effort. It’s all well and good to name a new arts district with great fanfare but with one theatre and no artists? One has to be willing to kick things into high gear to secure space, attract artists, and market the district, or visitors leave disappointed and they won’t come back.

The power of naming something into being isn’t confined to roads, villages, farms, castles, or medieval towns. It works for people too. Naming something, putting a label on a desire or goal, inches it one step closer to reality.  If we can name places into being, we can name phases of our own lives into being too.

When I was in architecture school, I would talk about my ideas in Design Studio, describing the building and how it looked, what you felt like walking through the spaces. My professor would look patiently at me, at all of us first year students, and say, “Draw it. If I can’t see it, it isn’t real.” Naming something is a bit like drawing the design idea. It clarifies it on paper and sets a goalpost. Naming puts a wrapper around a desire.

I remember reading Shonda Rhimes’ “The Year of Yes” and thinking how brilliant she is to put that simple label on twelve months of her life. She left it broad and made it easy. She didn’t say, “I am going out with friends more often,” or “I will say yes to speaking engagements regularly.” She simply wrapped her life in a label - “Year of Yes.” 

Her idea inspired me to label my own aspirational chunk of calendar time: Susan’s “Year of No.” I stopped trying to please everyone and started thinking about my time as a very valuable commodity that I needed to ration and protect. Having that “Year of No” in my head helped me focus on the goal and reduced the guilt I felt in the moment when I declined a request for help and tamped down my urge to pitch in.  

It also helps to have a starting point and some idea of the destination. The Romantic Road benefits from that spectacular Neuschwanstein Castle at the southern end of the road – compelling you forward, through town after town, over many miles.  

I have given some thought to what I would name this time in my life. Many people tell me I am on the trip of a lifetime. They are right but that makes me slightly uneasy. Like it’s going to be all downhill from here. Call me greedy but I want more. Not necessarily a road trip through Europe with the Blue Car every year but something that resembles the spirit of this trip.  As I look back on these weeks, one theme I see is the question I ask myself at least once (and often many times) on any given day.

Why not?

That looks like an interesting road. Should I turn right? Why not?

I was planning to write this morning…it’s Sunday and my essay is due tonight but this Cars and Coffee at Poppit Sands just appeared on my feed. It’s almost an hour away, I’ll have to pack fast and miss breakfast here at the hotel. And stay up late tonight to get this writing done. But…Why not?

I don’t know this couple, but they know the couple I met in the Lake District and they are Porsche people. Should I really stay at their loft in South Wales? Why not?

“Why not?” may sound like a challenge to list all the reasons against something. But for me, it has become the opposite: a small, almost casual way of scattering objections before they harden into fear.

So maybe I am in my period of “Why Not?”  It doesn’t say I will get to do a road trip like this again, but it does say that I have opened my heart and mind to all kinds of new experiences – where I live, who I share life with, where I choose to see the sunrise and sunset.

“Why not?” is not quite the same as yes. Yes often answers someone else’s invitation. “Why not?” begins closer to home. It rises in the moment before I talk myself out of the interesting road, the unexpected invitation, the less efficient choice.

My tour of the Porsche Factory last month offered one more testimony to the power of labels. When Ferdinand Porsche opened his engineering office in 1931, every project was recorded in the “Order Book.” The early numbers, our museum guide explained, did not all represent outside client orders. Some were internal projects; others remain unclear. The first true customer order came much later in the ledger.

Even Porsche understood that a number could create confidence before reality had fully caught up. No one wants to be Order No. 1. A higher number suggests experience, momentum, a track record. Sometimes the label helps the world believe in what is still becoming real.

So, I am naming this my era of “Why not?”

It protects me from my old habit of saying yes to everything and everyone, while opening the door to a different kind of yes — one rooted not in obligation, but in curiosity. It is not a promise that I will always be brave or spontaneous or free from doubt. It is simply a signpost I can carry with me. Perhaps even a permission slip.

An interesting road. A sudden invitation. A sunrise somewhere I had not planned to be.

Why not?

Susan

Blue Car Road Trip Miles: 4,168

From the Blue Car Europe Series