A17/Smallville

I like the A17. I like the fact that it is long and well-used but that although it mostly runs through countryside, no one's tried to make it into a motorway or even a dual carriageway. It remains a well used narrow strip of tarmac, with enough room for one lane of traffic on each side, a tributary that meanders in a north-westerly direction from Kings Lynn until it is subsumed by the automotive torrent of the A1. 

And I like the land it runs through, which is extraordinarily flat. Covered in fields of grain, the horizon is interrupted only by the occasion tree, farm buildings and windmills, which conspire, somehow, to remind me of Kansas, a place to which I've never been but that I always associate with Smallville. Yes, the A17 makes me think of Superman.

Of course, the fact that the road is single carriageway with very few places to overtake means that you just have to take your place in the queue of traffic and go with the flow, which, today, was slowed by the presence of a lot of tractors, which would join the road for a few miles before turning off again down some rough track. 

So, while I was quite happily resigned to an average speed of around 45 miles an hour and was content to sit back some way behind the car in front, I still couldn't bring myself to pull over to take a photo any one of the lovely harvest opportunities that presented themselves to me; I wasn't so relaxed that I wanted to lose my place in the traffic!

Luckily, a complicated tractor manoeuvre brought the traffic to a brief standstill, just long enough for me to put down the window passenger window and grab this shot.