If highways were “a twentieth-century version of the earlier trails,” as Steve Fitch suggests, then neon signs are the “modern trail markers along the highway” (Fitch), indicating where fuel, food, and a place to stay could be found. In this sense, like Marshall McLuhan writes of electric light in Extensions of Man, neon light is “pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name” (McLuhan). Twisted into brilliant flashing images, and commonplace, predictable phrases alike, America’s relationship with neon has always been one of both business and spectacle. If advertising sells a fantasy, neon immerses you in it. This is even more true looking back on neon landscape vernacular as relics of bygone eras. As Peter Laufer pointed out to me in a phone interview, neon signs “evoke a historical period that is radically different from ours today; It evokes a historical period when it was something new to be able to stop along the highway and go into a motel that was trying to offer accommodations that would be acceptable to the middle-class motorist with terminology like ‘clean rooms’ or ‘restaurant on premises’ or these kinds of things that seem redundant to the travel experience today” (Laufer). While neon signs are ultimately advertisements, the artistic and sociological function they serve in depicting the idiosyncrasies, attributes, and values of a locale is a typical characteristic of landscape vernacular.