(Bloomberg Opinion) -- With my summer trips abroad canceled, I decided to be resourceful about travel. Having lived in Northern Virginia for 30 years, I asked myself a simple question: Which local trip have I still not done?
Earlier in the summer I thought I might spend time in scenic Maine, but too many of my friends from the Northeast and mid-Atlantic seemed to be planning the same. I decided a more adventurous course of action would be to get in the car with my daughter Yana and spend a three-day weekend on the road.
We headed west, vowing to travel differently.
Lunch was in Morgantown, West Virginia, but rather than visit the university, we stopped for excellent Jamaican food with jerk chicken, oxtail and plantains — better than the equivalent in the D.C. area. A tip: If you’re ever looking for great food in obscure locales, don’t just google “best restaurants Morgantown WV,” as that will yield too many mainstream options. Pick a cuisine you don’t expect them to have, and Google something like “best Haitian restaurant Morgantown WV.” Whether a Haitian restaurant comes up (it didn’t), you’ll get a more interesting selection of “best” picks. In this case we learned that a town of 30,000 people has several Caribbean restaurants, highly rated ones at that.
At one point we pulled into a gas station to switch driving duties and saw a hot dog stand manned by a guy wearing Confederate-flag pants. I wonder if he knows that West Virginia seceded from Virginia proper to ally with the Union cause.
Our first full stop was in Parkersburg in the Ohio River Valley. This is not the idyllic West Virginia of fly fishing and kayaking; rather, the town has an oil and gas museum, and the broader region played a role in developing innovative suspension bridges in the 19th century.
The town held our interest for only a few hours, but that was OK. We had decided to see five states in the first day — driving into Virginia and western Maryland with periodic dips into Pennsylvania, and traversing northern West Virginia and southern Ohio.
Parkersburg’s most striking feature was the contrast between its splendid older architecture — both buildings and homes — and its horribly mediocre postwar designs. Plenty has been written on the economic decline of West Virginia and Appalachia, but less attention has been paid to the region’s visual and aesthetic decline, which interests me. After all, the recent economy is much richer than that of the 1920s or for that matter the 1890s, so why is the place uglier? On the brighter side, there seemed to be a (pre-Covid) thriving theater scene in Parkersburg.
Crossing into southern Ohio, we drove along the Ohio River, finding a thriving manufacturing economy based on plastics, polymers and the use of fracked natural gas. Passing one gleaming factory after another, it felt as if we had returned to 1960s America. That is hardly how the whole Rust Belt has evolved, but if you wish to see a mid-American economic success story (albeit not for climate change), there is hardly a better case study.
The nearby town of Marietta felt like a living example of Tocqueville’s notion of American community, with a lovely college and offices for civic organizations, such as a Moose Lodge and Rotary Club, scattered along the main walking streets. The town was the first settlement of the Northwest Territory, it was visited by Lafayette in 1825, and it has remnants of major Native American mounds and earthworks.
These days every trip is also a Covid-19 research venture, whether you like it or not. In Marietta, restaurant servers wore masks, as they are required to do, but no one else did. There was an indoor bar with patrons, and a nightclub with live music indoors and presumably a crowd — I wasn’t going to look. In the hotel breakfast room, the only visitor we saw started the conversation by referring to “the baloney virus, not the corona virus.”
Washington County, Ohio, home of Marietta, has had 117 reported Covid-19 cases in total, no active cases now, and 19 deaths to date. Those numbers may reflect insufficient testing, but no one seems panicked, and they are far from mounting an effective response.
On the way home, we stopped in a Hare Krishna temple, a cow farm and a commune complex, and had wonderful curried lentils.
Maybe you are tempted to pull out that fly-fishing rod after all, but after so much shelter in place, is that really what you need? Random exploration of America has never been more stimulating, and you need only turn the ignition key.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution. His books include "Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero."
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