Wannabe Travel Show: USA
After Iceland, I spent a summer in Virginia. And then the 2016 election cycle happened. Virginia was not the place to be at that time, given its deep political ties to D.C.
If you were alive and had a television or a Twitter account in 2016, you know what I mean. The country felt like it was tearing itself apart. Every headline was about division. Every conversation seemed to end in an argument. Red versus blue, urban versus rural, coast versus heartland. If you believed the news, America was a country that hated itself.
I didn’t buy it. Or at least, I didn’t want to buy it. I’d grown up in the Bible Belt of Indiana, spent my twenties in Manila, and came home to a country I barely recognized from the cable news coverage. I wanted to see it for myself. I’d lived among so many cultures up to that point, but what was America’s culture?
So I loaded up my Canon 5D Mark III, pointed the car west, and spent three months driving from Virginia to South Dakota, then eventually down to New Mexico. Thirteen episodes of the Wannabe Travel Show, season two.
The Route
The route took me through some of the most stunning terrain in the country. Badlands, mountains, coastline, desert. I chased national parks the way some people chase concerts. Glacier, Redwoods, Yosemite, Zion, Bryce, the Arizona canyons. Each one felt like a different planet.
Episode 1: United States of America Kickoff
The kickoff. A wannabe travel show host, hitting the road in his own country for once. What does the country look like once you get off the internet and onto the road? …and then post it back to the internet. Look, I’m just now seeing the irony.
Episode 2: South Dakota
The Badlands were the first thing that made me pull over and just stare. I’d been to Iceland, I’d hiked volcanoes, and somehow this landscape in my own country still caught me off guard.
I sat in the prairies and stared at the Milky Way. I found old missile silos that could have started World War III. I stayed in a town with a population of 97. The charm was immeasurable.
Episode 3: Wyoming
Wyoming is what happens when God decides to show off. The population density is nonexistent. The scenery is absurd. Yellowstone, while remarkable, has become Disney World Presents: Nature. Still, I’d go back in a heartbeat.
Episode 4: Glacier National Park, Montana
Glacier might be the most beautiful place in the lower 48. Driving Going-to-the-Sun Road stands as the best drive I’ve ever done … no guardrails, thousand-foot drop-offs, and scenery so absurd you forget to be terrified. Glacial valleys open up into mountainous peaks that shouldn’t be real … except there I was, looking at them.
Episode 5: Seattle, Washington
A brief urban interlude. Coffee, the Space Needle, and my brother … who heard “I want to see nature” and took me to a city park to look at ducks. Seattle wasn’t where I wanted to be after weeks in the wilderness, but I’ll admit — they know how to make a good cup of coffee.
Episode 6: Oregon Coast
The Oregon coast is the Pacific Northwest’s best kept secret. Rocky, moody, and exactly the kind of quiet I needed after Seattle. I don’t remember many of the details. I just remember feeling calm.
Episode 7: Northern California
Eureka (the town, not the exclamation) is where I began to see how different my Midwest upbringing could be from the West Coast life. I fixed my Airbnb host’s wifi, and she invited us to dinner in return. We cooked together, talked for hours, shared good wine, disagreed on just about everything going on with our country. And yet, it was one of the best nights of the trip.
And all of this under redwoods older than most civilizations. Hard not to gain some perspective.
Episode 8: Pacific Coast Highway
The PCH is everything they say it is. Cliffs dropping into the ocean, the road hugging the edge, the sun doing that thing where it turns everything gold for about twenty minutes before it disappears.
I met Leo Laporte, the guy from TechTV who made middle-school me realize I wasn’t so weird for liking tech. I met up with an old YouTube friend I hadn’t seen in years. I drank wine at a Napa Valley winery I still hunt bottles from to this day.
Episode 9: Yosemite National Park
I’d misbooked my stay in Yosemite. Somehow I booked a cabin a solid hour out of the park. After entering the park for the first time, I understood why anything closer was impossible to find. I didn’t get nearly enough time in Yosemite, but I came to appreciate why John Muir dedicated his life to preserving this place.
Episode 10: Southern Nevada
Not Vegas. The other Nevada. The one with Valley of Fire, Red Rock Canyon, and helicopter views of the Grand Canyon. The desert has a way of stripping everything down to the essentials.
My Airbnb hosts here took me in like family. Home-cooked meals, long conversations on the porch overlooking Hoover Dam. They were the kind of people who make sure you’ve eaten before they’ll let you leave. By the end of the week, saying goodbye felt like leaving home. I felt like I owed them an invitation to my wedding.
Episode 11: Utah
Utah broke my brain. The moment I crossed the border, I could not comprehend the gigantic rock structures I was looking at. And those were just the ones in somebody’s backyard. By the time I got to Zion, to Bryce, I ran out of ways to say “I can’t believe this is real.”
I got to know my hosts here, too. Mostly over their turkey picking a fight with me. But also over a talk radio host we both happened to be listening to at the same time. “Wait, you listen to that show?” “Of course, every day … you listen to that??”
Episode 12: Arizona
The Grand Canyon. Horseshoe Bend. And the red rocks of Sedona. This is what happens when erosion has a few million years and a flair for the dramatic.
It’d become a habit for me to get to know my hosts by now. Sedona challenged me, if only because that’s when the election that had set me on this journey was finally taking place. My host and I saw things differently then, yet we found space to be friendly and amicable to each other. We weren’t our politics. We were travelers.
Episode 13: New Mexico
Taos was a place I didn’t even know existed until I stumbled upon a fascinating fact: it hosts the oldest continuously inhabited community in the entire country.
I’d intended to keep going, but traveling does take its toll. The relationship I’d been in throughout my journeys fell apart. I was tired. I was homesick. I just wanted to relax.
I ended the show here, but I had more stops to make before arriving home.
So, Was America Divided?
The short answer: not really. Or at least, not in the way the news wanted you to believe.
The people I met along the way were kind. They were curious about where I’d been and where I was going. They’d recommend a diner down the road or a trailhead I shouldn’t miss. Politics came up, but if you could see the person sitting across from you, it remained respectful. Most folks were just living their lives in some of the most beautiful corners of a country that, from the inside, didn’t feel nearly as broken as the headlines suggested.
I’m not naive. I know the divisions are real, and they run deep in places. But three months on the road taught me that the space between people is a lot smaller than the space between their politicians.
No matter how the political climate blows, no matter how much the media tries to convince you otherwise, America is still a land of beauty. A land of diverse, inspiring people who’d rather share a meal with you than argue about the news. I drove thousands of miles expecting to find a divided country.
I found my home instead.