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Comment by doonesbury | Hacker News Reader

This article explains why travel in a lot of the US (born and raised here) is not interesting except for New Orleans and maybe Austin, or SF and Berkeley. There's a despair here that I bet the French or Portuguese have a perfect word for.

I hope old Europe doesn't fully go this way because it's my favorite place to go. It's oldness is very soothing which is a sensibility or modality I got from my father.

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I'll concede that most US cities are probably not worth traveling to for the architecture alone. most US cities I've visited do have some hidden gems though. it's not stuff you'd easily find researching for a vacation though. when possible, I try to stay with a friend who already lives in the place I want to travel too. I've always been pleasantly surprised by what a city has to offer when I travel this way.

I've traveled most of the US on wheels and I feel this. I have an intense urge to take my oldest car on a long unplanned roadtrip just for the adventure of doing it, but I never go because 'Where would I go? It's all an interstate and a bunch of nothing new". Yes, there are small towns, but even through those you have to drive 15hs to find something that stands out.

What they don't tell you in movies about the American roadtrip in a convertible is that it's really long no matte where you go and really boring for the most part.

I travelled using a 50cc motorbike from France to Istanbul.

Avoiding motorways was necessary, but it turned out to be an amazing improvement. I now actively try to travel using just back roads and I try not to be in a hurry to reach a destination. I now find travel is best done slowly, unoptimally, via the less usual routes, and that the journey is often the best part (especially when travelling with a good travel buddy).

That's what I thought too until I found this guy's website: http://bigdogadventures.com/

He has a Honda CB500X and Husqvarna 701 (I don't know much about motorcycles, but I do know that's not the same as sibling comment's 50cc) and he rides all over the US on the backroads and dirt roads. It's full of local cafés, covered bridges, ghost towns, remote mountain roads, and the like. He takes photos and videos and documents the whole thing on an old-fashioned website. It really made me want to ride a motorcycle.

When you're just a tourist, you'll often be limited to tourist traps or other locations that are aimed specifically at people who are just superficially passing through.

How can anyone expect to see the real "soul" of a place just... by driving by?

"C'est déprimant ici" is what I usually say when I enter any midsize US city.

I don't see European cities going this way, people care about architecture there. Just look south of the border how Mexico has a lot of beautiful cities.

Funny - as someone in Europe that has spent time in the US I kinda see the opposite. I wonder if some psychological biases are at play here.

To me my home country feels all very regular and the US has strong styles to where I could pick out an American town from most other countries. But to you the opposite is probably true, USA towns seem all very normal and regular to you.

I can't help but feel like this is a result of capitalist optimization, melting pot culture, and declining religious adherents among other factors. In other words: the cities are reflections of the individual level, where diversity in all it's meanings continue to decrease. Much of the biggest differences between the Midwest and the South or the East Coast and the West are summed up to first order economically - some areas are cheaper, have fewer restaurants and jobs, and vice versa. There's little serious cultural difference between these areas relative to the "interesting areas".

Homogenization begins at the people level, and America is increasingly homogenized at the surface level.

> There's a despair here that I bet the French or Portuguese have a perfect word for.

Why those languages? I'd imagine that kind of dispair would be the specialty of German or some East European language.

It's a different "flavor" of despair then what you're probably thinking those languages might have

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