Travel Locally, Where You Are(ssp.sh) |
Travel Locally, Where You Are(ssp.sh) |
I've been in many a road trip up, down, and across the Great Plains of the US, where I spend a full day driving only to arrive in a town and geography that looks the exact same as the one I woke up in that morning. Only the signs are different.
I found a strawberry festival and ate enough strawberry things to make myself sick. I found an artists commune and stayed with those weird old hippies for two days..I found a diner with a waitress who was in her 90's and had worked the same job for like 70 years.
We happily spend our vacations just driving around in the middle of the country with no plan.
Drive side roads.
Honestly, most of the US is like this. It's huge and very, very sparse.
But I think the challenge here is that we can have great places if we do the following:
1. Focus on transportation and ways of living that focus on walking or taking a tram.
2. Create and support medium-density, mixed-use neighborhoods
3. Require good, sound architectural principles. When you think of Paris and those narrow streets or the apartment complexes in the best neighborhoods, we need those. None of this modernist bullshit or 5-over-1s made with recycled concrete. Use bricks, stone, and more. Incorporate design elements requiring skilled craftsmen, and pay for it.
Those 3 alone should get you most of the way there.
My final comment would be, when you're thinking about spending $5,000 - $10,000 or whatever on a big international trip to go look at some nice stuff in some other country, consider spending that money instead on your own home, or garden, or donate to organizations that maintain those things for you. It also doesn't have to be all or none, you can still travel, and still invest locally. Make where you live the kind of place you would have wanted to travel to. Gardens in Great Britain, for example, can happen where you live too you just need to spend the money and build and maintain those things... like they do.
The transit and transportation stuff is much more difficult to fix. Most Americans want a Jeep and suburban house and to wait in line and beep their horn at the Costco gas station and that's a tough hill to climb, but the 3 items I highlighted above are guaranteed to increase quality of life and lower costs long-term.
In a large city, you can often just walk in one direction, (or take transport in one direction), find yourself in a new neighbourhood and discover loads of interesting things (culture, food, shops, parks, ...).
In London there are hundreds of walks/hikes around and beyond the green belt, all within an hour train from central London.
I do agree that there are some places where this is more challenging.
Overreliance on echo-chambering platforms like Reddit/IG/Google Maps limits one's ability to explore. There's still lots to discover. And re-discover as you grow up.
they say that airtravel killed the catskills resorts (ala dirty dancing) because why spend a few hours in teh car when you could go someplace so much more exotic with a few hours on the plane? and now there's a second-wave killing it with social media travel photos. everybody feels like they need to travel to the same handful of farflung locales that have been deemed 'the best'. basically, people with the means to travel have decided that regional travel isn't cool enough to impress their friends, so they let it die.
i think that's a terrible mistake for everybody. people dont have a fun, affordable place to go on a little weekend jaunt. towns that could scrape by on their natrual beauty have been left to decay (and once there's no way to monetize the natural beauty, local development sees no reason to preserve it).
> here in SwitzerlandNot to say the message of the article is completely without merit - there are things to see and do almost everywhere. But if I just get in the car and start driving I will 95% of the time find only strip malls and cornfields. Perhaps a suburban park with some trees.
Last week I hiked the Paparoa trail (West coast NZ) for 4 days through old mining trails with one of my friends who was a local historian and gold prospector, the whole experience was fascinating, and great inspiration for my next novel.
But visiting local destinations is also such a joy. I'm a mile from one of the best BBQ joints in Michigan, in a "blink and you miss it" village. I try and make sure I don't take it for granted.
But even without this, traveling in the country side, getting to learn the history of those places, with the "small history", not the big battles, but the local inventions, the local specialties, etc, is so enriching and rewarding
Flat for example. The southern portion of the Midwest can be quite hilly (the northern portion not as much, due to glaciers).
But even there, the definition of "flat" gets confused with "not mountainous". If the topography varies a lot, but there aren't mountains, is it flat? (Max/min vs variance)