Iowa and ignorance
I stumbled on a stupid clickbait here on Medium article about “7 states you should skip on your next road trip,” and Iowa was near the top of the list. I’m not going to link to it.
It made me irrationally angry. To be fair, driving through the cornfields on I-80 for hours is not exciting, even if Iowa can claim the world’s largest truck stop.
But the key to enjoying Iowa (or Nebraska for that matter) is to get off the freeway, explore the character of the farms and small towns, get to know the people like 70-year-old cyclist John, the family that took me to see the world’s largest anatomically correct bull, or the “largest group of people eating corn dogs.”
Or just do the legendary RAGBRAI.
It just so happened that I found this clickbait article 10 years to the day that I returned from a bike trip from Denver to Milwaukee, which took me through a memorable stretch of the country despite the lack of population centers.
I think that experience accounts for my reaction to that ignorant article. Here’s what I learned from my bike trip about the kindness of strangers.
