21 Days, 14 States, 6,000 miles

I returned yesterday from a 21-day road trip which brought me to 14 states over 6,000 miles. Phew, what a trip!

Steven driving in the middle
of the night thru Missouri.

     I'm grateful that my family was with me for a week, and Steven drove about half the miles with me which was really fun.
     A few things struck me anew about America as I traveled from place-to-place. I marvel at what makes America the America it is. It has problems - BIG problems actually - but there is also a fabric which holds the country together.
     So here are some thoughts on my trip:
   1) America is more like an assortment of mini-cultures rather than a homogenous unit. The worldview in the Midwest (Missouri for example) is so radically different than the Northeast;
   2) High brow Northeast intellectualism is unlike anything else in the U.S. Steven and I visited three Ivy League schools and could have gotten bloody noses from breathing the rarified air of those contexts;
   3) The Civil War is ancient history to northerners (Yankees) like me; it is fresh news to many southerners. General Robert E. Lee is alive in the memories of those living in Dixie;
   4) Coming home to Denver I realize how much cultures change when you go from the Midwest of Kansas to the Mountain State of Colorado. Mountain states people are rugged individualists, Midwesterners and Southerners are more community oriented;
   5) I did not travel to the West Coast on this trip, but I have been in California, Oregon, and Washington many times. That's the subject for another blog post, since the left coast is literally and metaphorically as far as the east is from the west.