By the Time I Get to Flagstaff

The 10,000-plus songs on my iPod include Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”

It came up in the shuffle rotation a few minutes ago and I found myself questioning the route.

Assuming Glen is dumping his girlfriend in Los Angeles and the reference to Oklahoma is the farthest point east mentioned in the song, Phoenix is kinda out of the way.

Google Maps puts the driving distance from L.A. to Oklahoma City at 1,386 miles or 19 hours and 44 minutes via I-10 to Phoenix, then up I-17 to Flagstaff, and then on to the referenced Albuquerque waypoint where you take I-40 the rest of the way to OKC.

But the more logical route – 1,332 miles and about an hour shorter – is I-15 up to I-40 at Barstow and then blaze east to OKC.

So if songwriter Jimmy Webb had Google Maps or GPS back in 1965, he might have written “By the Time I Get to Flagstaff.”

(That, of course, assumes all of the above mentioned Interstate highways existed in 1965. Not sure about that. I know that I-70 from Indianapolis to Terre Haute, Ind., didn’t open until the late 1960s.)