I've been driving down into the Mon Valley a fair amount lately, and for me, that's not a familiar part of the Greater Pittsburgh Metropolitan Labyrinth.

In the 14 years I've lived in and around the city, I've gotten to know my way around pretty well. Better, in fact, than many of the natives, who know their quadrant (East, Dahnere, West, Uppere) inside out but might as well be on the moon -- or in Moon -- if you blindfolded them and drove them five miles in any other direction.

Especially if a river or tunnel is traversed. Here be dragons.

In situations involving adventure travel, such as to the Mon Valley, I rough out a route in my head and then consider use of the belt system.

I'm not from here.

I was talking with my friend Jay, who is from here, and I told him I was looking for shortcuts between routes 88 and 19, and I mentioned the Orange and Yellow belts.

"Oh!" he said. "What?"

"You know, the belts. What we have instead of a proper beltway around the city. The back roads with signs."

"I never pay any attention to those," he said. "I notice the signs now and then, but I never knew what they were exactly."

"They're routes around the city. The colors are the colors of the rainbow -- you know, red, orange, yellow and so on, with the Red Belt being the farthest out and the Purple Belt being right down around the Point."

"Huh!"

"You're not the first I've had to explain this to. How come the natives don't seem to realize they're there?"

"Maybe the belts are infrared and ultraviolet, so we can't see them."

I moved to Pittsburgh in 1994, and I was lost until sometime around Labor Day of 1996. That's when I found a bookstore and bought "Pittsburgh Figured Out" just for its improbable title.

It was a revelation. It held the secrets of how to avoid tunnel backups, how to get to the airport when the Parkway West is in ruins and how to get around the suburbs without driving into the city and back out. There were tips about parking. Most welcome was, at long last, the reassurance that it wasn't just me -- there really is no good way to get between Bigelow Boulevard and the Parkway West. (This is why the South Hills needs its own Trader Joe's.)

It wasn't just me -- you can't get directly onto the Veterans Bridge from the central North Side, so you have to get on the Fort Duquesne Bridge if you want to get to the Parkway East.

It wasn't just me -- if you try to take the Liberty Bridge to the South Side, you'll have to get there by way of Mount Washington. Or Dormont.

But the map I found myself staring at most gratefully was the one of the county belt system, the rainbow pathways that guide baffled drivers cross-country from one main artery to another. They offer a way to cut from, say, Interstate 79 to 28, or 88 to 22/30, without all that tedious mucking about in the city when a hockey game is just getting out or half the bridges have been condemned.

True, taking the belts often means crawling through every school zone in an entire district, and some of them aren't true belts (in the sense of being roughly circular with the ends meeting) but more like loosely sketched arcs with pieces missing. Some of them come to a river and just fall in, never to be seen again.

Still, they can be handy when you're trying to chart a course through unfamiliar territory without bursting into tears and calling Triple A.

I think of the belts as trails of bread crumbs. Sometimes they lead you home. Sometimes they lead you all over hell's half acre before depositing you on Route 19. Sometimes the birds eat them somewhere out near the airport and leave you lost and wandering aimlessly.

It could be worse. You could be on Brownsville Road.

My advice: Find a house for sale and start your own Moon colony.