Two Days' Driving West

I have recently been away as far as I've ever gotten by car.  Since I didn’t grow up in a long road-trip kind of family or do the post-college cross-country trek,  it only takes Indianapolis, IN and Louisville, KY to hold that record.  That's IN and KY in the oddly named Midwest, scarcely more than a quarter of the way across America.  Two days of two-person driving, with an overnight halfway at a conveniently situated cousin in Pittsburgh.

Behind a rest stop along Route 70 in Ohio

We drove out to visit our first-born, now inconveniently situated 700+ miles inland.   The rest of our immediate three generations are nicely lined up along Route 95, from Cambridge to Washington DC, but not Daughter #1, not since she left Portland, Maine. 

The landscape didn’t get markedly different. Much like New Jersey, with the same trees, only in different percentages; fewer pines, oaks and maples, maybe more tulip trees and that tree (Mimosa?) with the frond-like leaves that grows everywhere. 

This may not be Louisville's suburban
Hancock Fabrics store, but this is what it looks like. 

The businesses were the same, with the same six or seven fast-food franchises all along the interstates. In the malls, the same damn quick-serves, Olive Gardens, Outbacks, Applebees, Paneras and Chipotles.  The same dozen big box stores, too, making every suburb and much of every downtown reflect the same megalo-martification.

From western PA through eastern Ohio the hills were smaller than I'm used to, before they flattened out entirely.  But we're still not talking Kansas, as I've seen it described. Lots of nice rest stops in Ohio without the food courts of the damned -- just rest rooms, maps and brochures, vending machines and perhaps a church group selling coffee to raise funds.

We really didn’t get a chance to feel the storied monotony of a transcontinental road trip, not in two days, and not with Radio Lab podcasts to play from my iPad. I also traded at least half a dozen work-related emails on the smart phone. Too many entertainment options and way too much connectivity.

Thinking the Heartland was a place where women still sewed, I expected to rediscover (and shop in) the small-chain fabric stores that had abandoned New Jersey over the past 20 years. But, no, we were road traveling, not time traveling. The same Joann’s is all I saw on Yelp searches, plus the one other surviving national chain: Hancock Fabrics.  In Louisville, KY, I enjoyed Hancock, which is nowhere near me in NJ and has a better selection of real sewing stuff. A woman who worked there could recommend no other places, besides the local Joann’s; “everyone’s buying online,” she said, sadly.

And if not buying online, at least finding on-line. Yelp and the smart phone levels the playing field between longtime resident and just-arrived. Do you need a present on the way home for your cousin’s new dog? Just turn on your smartphone and Yelp or Google your way to the Petco within the next three exits. A new bath mat for your kid? Find the Bed Bath & Beyond.  Gluten-free cereal? The local Trader Joe’s. 

In homogenized retail America, you need suffer no dead ends, no delays and no surprises.  Maybe smaller towns are different.

On the way home, we decided to seize the opportunity to see a few cities we would probably never have seen otherwise; Louisville and Cincinnati. When I next get around to it, I’ll describe a few things we saw that you can’t find in NJ.