On The Road ... Map

On a trip to visit family, we stopped at a gas station in Hammondville, Alabama. On the wall was a map of the US with this wear pattern of customers touching where they were on the map. The many touchers have worn though the paper map down to the underlying supporting board. It seems that many have traced their path of travel extending southwest to Birmingham, AL and northwest to Chattanooga, TN likely along the connecting route US 11, passing through Hammondville, or along the parallel interstate 59 a bit further west. What remains is a roughly ellipsoidal bivariate frequency distribution of wear with a greater frequency of wear centered on Hammondville and lesser frequencies of wear in ellipsoidal contours around it.