Monday, December 10, 2007

Andrew Warner’s Road Trip and Highway Exits

Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati

Andrew Warner’s Road Trip is in full gear, as he currently approaches New Orleans.  (Hopefully, he’ll capture YouTube footage of himself arguing with the psychics at Jackson Square—assuming the Square has reassumed the identity I remember from the pre-Katrina days.)  As I’ve been vicariously following his journey through his Cin-Weekly blog (the first Cin-Weekly blog I’ve ever read), I’ve been remembering some of my own experiences on the road from my younger days.  Specifically, I’ve been thinking about highway exits.

In my travels, what I noticed about many highway exits was how they were magnets for sprawl.  The highway exit is where you will find chain gas stations, chain fast-food restaurants—and, depending on the size of the town—chain lodging, chain shopping, chain drinking, and so forth.

Sure, many places have surprising experiences of locality, but the novelty of those wears away the more time you spend in a particular locale.

Anyway, in my driving, I would often look at the sprawl of a highway exit, and think to myself, “What a terrible looking place to live.”  Then, one day, I had the epiphany:  my own highway exit is not much different from the countless exits of sprawl I have bemoaned in my travels.  All places, to some degree, are delightful to visit from the perspective of an outsider.  So many of these destinations are just examples of urban sprawl at highway exits.  If a town is too small even to have that, it is probably only worth a quick drive five-second drive through its downtown from the perspective of the traveler—just another notch on the “been there, done that” measuring stick.

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