THIS POST stuck in the drafts folder for several years. It is from August 2021.

This past month, my family and I took a long journey across the country to see family. It was a 6,500-mile odyssey in a rental RV for my first look of my parents and brother and sister-in-law since COVID-19 began. The trip revealed a lot about America, much of which seemed to mirror the happenings in our world. Here are some of the “other” observations:

• America is huge: logging 6,500 miles, we still only saw 17 states.
• America grows A LOT: we saw thousands of acres of almost only corn and soybeans. There were a smattering of potatoes. All of our wheat must be grown elsewhere. My son counted several hundred tractors.
• America is beautiful:
  • We saw amazingly beautiful rivers, both names we knew and names we had never heard before: Yellowstone, Bluestone, Clark Fork, Fox, Missouri all wowed the four of us.
  • We saw charming towns and cities along the way: little hamlets in NW Wyoming; North Manchester, Indiana; Fort Wayne, IN; Rockfort, IL; St. Paul, MN; Coeur D’Alene, ID were all surprisingly charming.
  • US-20 through Iowa has it’s own website, but US-20 in Illinois was a rural delight.
  • US-30 through Indiana was full of great little towns, farm land and rural vistas around every gentle turn.

As we crossed America, the country was debating a hefty infrastructure bill in Congress. It was striking to hear about infrastructure while utilizing large swaths of said infrastructure. Tuning into NPR throughout the month, we had some insights into the debate.

• American infrastructure is so VAST even the incomprehensible sticker price of the current bill didn’t seem adequate. You could spend $3trillion in the 17 states we traveled and still have plenty more work to do.
• Some states are using highway dollars better than others:
  • North Dakota and Wisconsin both had really good roads.
  • South Dakota, Ohio and Minnesota all had bad roads. Crossing from Wisconsin into Minnesota was a real shock to the struts of our poor RV. Passing again OUT of Minnesota into North Dakota showed us that the whole state of Minnesota is in rough shape.
  • One particularly ugly area, road wise, was the greater Chicago metro area. A large portion of American road travel bottlenecks in that area and it showed. There was certainly repair and construction going on, but when you feel how rough the places they weren’t repairing, you know the whole system is bad
  • As we were passing through Minneapolis I thought: where was the bridge that fell down a few years ago? Am I on that road? Are these other bridges safe? I kept these questions to myself so as to not frighten the rest of the family.
    • Driving in a rental RV, one feels the road differently. Every bump and dip in the road is felt. The worst bumps were where roads joined into bridges. Through the nation those seams are in rough shape.
  • My home state of Washington had one of the worst sections east bound near Cle Elum. A feature of the road designed to help truckers stay awake made our poor RV shake and shudder for MILES!
  • My home state also had the best long stretch of interstate: crossing from Idaho into Washington you are greeted with 100+ miles of smooth, flawless blacktop. After 6,000 miles, it was a pleasant welcome to experience your road-tax dollars being spent well.
• Infrastructure is more than roads: it’s parks and trails for recreation. And we found lovely public parks throughout the US. We went the RV route so as to not eat out. We wound up picnicking in the parks of America.
  • Our family’s favorite park was found in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It had a GREAT splashpad. It had several covered picnic areas. There were trails throughout the park and a trail from town connecting to it. There is no excuse for anyone being unhealthy in Fort Wayne, IN!
  • We found lovely parks in Wall, South Dakota; Missoula, Montana; Coeur D’Alene, Idaho; Madison, Wisconsin; Athens, Ohio; Fargo, North Dakota.

This past month saw a serious spike in COVID-19 cases throughout the country, due in large part to the Delta variant. We saw the re-emergence of doctors and nurses pleading for the public to return to counter measures of mask wearing, social distancing and vaccination to deal with the crush of hospitalizations. No place has been spared this spike. But not all places are dealing with it the same way.

COVID-19 changed the way our family travel. The purpose of the RV was to reduce our exposure to the greater public. We continued to stay out of restaurants. Our pnly public forays were Target runs for candy and the occassional grocery story. We also adjusted our route according to the COVID map. We avoided places that were more red. Specifically, Missouri was flaming red at the beginning of our trip. I would have loved to have gone through my old stomping grounds in the St. Louis area…but that seemed rather foolish in the face of the COVID outbreaks there.

We also couldn’t help but notice the lackadaisical manner that many Americans have taken to fighting COVID. In short, most Americans we saw had stopped trying. COVID was not a part of their life and they seemed to live in complete denial of it. For example, we stopped in Eau Claire, Wisconsin for a Target run. At that time, Eau Claire had a 39% vaccination rate. Only a handful of people in Target were wearing masks, aside from employees. This scene repeated itself throughout the upper Midwest of the country. Whereas I would previously scoff at maskless people in my local grocery store, I can now say with confidence that mask wearing in Washington is among the best in the nation. the only place taking it more seriously than Washington was Portland, OR where I saw people alone on a sunny day outdoors still masking up. Kudos to Portland.

The final effect COVID had on our travel was that we missed out on some of the lovely local cuisine throughout the country. I kept trying to find a way to get some authentic Kansas City BBQ, but it wasn’t in the works. We obliged some of the local eats, wherever we could find friendly and convenient curbside service. Notably, Big J’s Roadhouse in Humboldt, South Dakota accommodated us with amazing BBQ late on a Saturday night. Perhaps strangely, the McDonald’s in Stockton, Illinois were rememberably sweet helping us feed the kids when we were short tempered and our fridge was understocked.