Earlier in that day of the Texas flash flood that nearly swept our trailer away a few months ago, we watched the odometer in our truck turn 77,777 miles. While that evening was full of excitement, normally such an event would be a big deal.

Well, at least for me.

On long stretches of highway, what I used to consider numerical anagrams are always something I look forward to. Then I learned at Google University that the proper term for such a sequence of digits is a palindromic number. These are numbers that read the same forward and back. And when the mileage gets up there like it has on our Dodge, it’s fun to figure out the next palindrome we’ll reach in our travels.

OK. It’s  no exciting, rip roaring, click you heels kinda fun. But it does give a long haul driver something to think about for a few miles. Like what would be the next palindromic number in sequence in our example here? Hint, we passed that over a thousand miles ago.

The first few are easy. Not including single digit numbers, they begin with 11, 22, 33, 44… etc. The fun, however, doesn’t really begin until you get to much larger numbers, like 101,101 for instance. Maybe we’ll hit that one during our next season on the road down south.