posted 2007/08/20 at 15:15
At the end of my seventh grade year I went on a school field trip to Washington DC for a week or so. As with so many other things at that private school I went to, this was not exactly a happy time for me for a lot of personal reasons, and we also just happened to go to DC a couple of days before the Tiannamen Square Massacre, which made things all the more interesting there. Perhaps what was most noteworthy about this trip, though, was that it marked the first time in my life I had ever left the Ohio-Michigan bistate area, as in addition to DC we also traveled through Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Then, for close to sixteen years after this trip, I once again never left Ohio and Michigan, what with a lack of money combined with a family that doesn't particularly care to travel that much.
That changed during my spring break of 2005, however accidentally. I went down one Sunday to Cincinatti to go to a couple of places, and in the process of getting lost in a city I'd never been to my entire life, I found myself in Kentucky for all of about five minutes, just long enough to make a U-turn. I can still remember how once I crossed the state line into Kentucky, it seemed like every other building housed a discount cigarette outlet. The following March, I made my big trip to North Carolina for my 30th birthday to take part in a dance game tournament and meet some Internet friends; in addition to North Carolina, I also passed through Virginia again, and drove through West Virginia for the first time ever. I wasn't in school this past year, of course, so I didn't have a "break" per se, and at the time I didn't feel like doing any traveling.
The thing is, this past winter I went to Cleveland for another dance game tournament (this last time as only a spectator, not a participant), and traveling the Ohio Turnpike brought my mind more to travel. I've never really been into cars that much -- although considering how much of a car nut my father is, I may have kind of a skewed view there -- but I do find something soothing in taking a good long drive somewhere, at least when it's not the dead of winter and the roads are slippery. I also have to admit that I have a strange attraction to cheap road food, the kind of overpriced, greasy, three-hours-under-a-heat-lamp, bad-for-you junk that you can only find in service plazas on the highways. As much as I love a high-quality pizza, scuzzy pizzas also hold a special space in my heart, although with me dieting and all I don't get to have them very often.
Anyway, all of this kind of culminated this past Saturday when I drove to Indiana for no other reason than to drive and to say that I had stepped foot in Indiana. It was only about an hour's drive each way, and it's not like I visited anyplace in Indiana save a couple of service plazas, although given that Indiana recently privatized its turnpike I got to learn even more about why privatization is not always a good thing. (Three words: Golden arches everywhere.) Looking at it from a logical standpoint I really had no good reason to make this trip, but I guess there's a part of me that feels better for having made it, and if nothing else I've now been to nine different states and DC.
The big irony here, of course, is that it'd be much less travel and hassle for me to go to Canada now than to visit another state. I'm not sure where I want to go next -- I think Illinois is the next closest state to me, and if I stay on the turnpike then I'd pass so close to Wisconsin that there wouldn't be any sense in not going there -- but again, I'm not sure if there's much of a point in going to these states just to say I've been there, except that, for whatever reason, it feels nice to say that I've been to another state. I suppose I shouldn't worry about this until next spring or summer, though, and who knows, maybe by then I'll have a compelling reason to venture out further from my homebase here in Toledo.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon