I’ve driven across the US 4x. This includes from LA to NY, and back, from SF to NY, and back. And I’ve flown throughout the US, too many times to even count.
Anyhow, one thing I love doing when driving, is taking unknown roads, and getting lost, not knowing exactly where it is I’m going to, but just driving and taking the landscape in.
I have come across little, tiny towns, where blight is overwhelming. They’re like ghost towns. Barns, Victorian homes that look like skeletons of their former embodiment, still standing, through years of changing weather. Cemeteries, where tombstones reveal very short lives of children who lived just a few years, their families buried beside them. Churches that are hidden away from view, accessed via roads consisting of rich red, dirt, or cobblestone. The desert at daybreak, and in the still of the night, and thousands of tiny little stars, twinkling a million miles away. The harvest moon illuminating cotton fields, skinny, underfed horses, grazing hay and tall grass, interspersed with tumbleweed and heavy, lazy trees, shadowing them from the sun. Every now and then, a lone walker would appear on a lesser traveled road, going who knows where? I’ve ridden on horseback through mountains and hills, and have come across cattle, roaming freely, coyotes, ducks, waterfalls, and caves. I’ve toured the Hoover Dam, and gone down south, to the Gulf of Mexico, driven through border towns, and have gotten some gorgeous Native American jewelry from little tourist spots, sprinkled sparsely though the southwest.
My bucket list is filled with places and things I want to travel through, like walking the Appalachian Trail, boating through the Everglades, and seeing parts of Alaska, Utah, Montana, and New Mexico that I have yet to see, while traveling in an RV so that I may stay a bit, and explore further.
America is a BEAUTIFUL country, and seeing it from the sky, offers only a partial view of it’s vastness and history.