Bordeaux and Palmiers

I have by now traveled through much of Western Europe, but I have seen comparatively very little of the US. I was born and raised in New York, and I’ve seen a lot of the Eastern seaboard. I went to high school in New England, and I lived for one year in San Francisco, but I haven’t seen a lot of Middle America… I don’t really know where everyone else lives.

When I lived in Canada, I had a friend who liked to do random things, which was lucky, because I like to do random things too. One day, we decided we were going to go on a road trip with no destination, and so at five o’clock in the morning, I picked him up, and we drove. We drove from Toronto to New York State, and then we decided that we wanted to cross another state boarder. After consulting our map, we decided to go to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

We took the entire trip on back roads, driving past houses and tiny towns made up of no more than a gas station. We drove on winding, hilly tarmac, often the only car rushing past the landscapes of rural Pennsylvania.

We stopped on the shoulder every so often to take pictures: I had never concentrated so much on where I was instead of where I was going. We didn’t actually reach Lancaster County until the following morning, but it didn’t seem to matter.

I drove for ten hours, and though my sanity was temporarily threatened, in retrospect, I loved that trip. I loved everything about the all-American vibe we got from every town we stopped in. I loved taking pictures of little things I never would have seen otherwise.

I loved the quaint diner we stopped in when we arrived in Lancaster County in the morning, and I loved the severely cheap breakfast that we were served there (and the unlimited coffee).

Being in Europe makes me appreciate the pure Americana of a trip like that. America is just so big compared to Europe: they don’t have landscapes like that over here. There are rural areas, make no mistake, but everything about them seems to be quaint… a little bit false. There’s something so comforting to me about knowing that places like Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania exist somewhere in the world.

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