Today my family began our trip out to Nebraska from New Jersey by driving out to South Bend, Indiana. We are going to spend a couple of days in Chicago next, but this was as far as we thought we could get without exhausting ourselves. We also like South Bend (college towns are the best) and know a hotel here with a good hot breakfast. When you travel the same stretch of road so many times, you figure out important information like this.
It's a much nicer hotel than what I would normally spring for, but we have credit card rewards points that get it for us for free. This is a far cry from my childhood vacations, often spent at low-slung cheap motels on the roadside with hard mattresses and sandpapery sheets. I've found classing it up helps morale among the troops after a hard day on the road.
My kids are getting older and one dividend is that they demand fewer bathroom breaks. We made it all the way to South Bend only stopping three times: once in the morning for gas, once to eat lunch, once to gas again in the afternoon. This also meant that I had less of a chance to see what was going on in the areas we traveled through. For that reason I am not sure how much I can trust my observation that there was a real decrease in the amount of visible MAGA stuff in rural Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. I noticed a farmer with a Trump sign, a pretty elaborate "God Family and Guns" truck decal, and that was about it. There was a Cybertruck with Texas plates and a "Legalize Recreational Plutonium" magnet, but the political valence of that one was hard to parse. My gut tells me that Trump's appeal among his former voters is waning at the edges and this confirms my suspicions.
While I was on the road proper I marveled at the beauty of some underloved landscapes. The mountains of Central Pennsylvania are quietly gorgeous, for example. The fields and farms of northern Indiana sure look pretty in the evening light, too.
Now that I have been living in the Northeast for thirteen years, I get a little bit of a shock when I return to my Midwestern stomping grounds. I do not mean this as a judgement, but an observation: people in the Midwest do not seem to put much care into their clothing and looks. In my short time I've seen grown men in tube socks pulled up to their knees, women in ugly "crop pants" paired with the 90s "Rachel" haircut, and scores of people wearing what look to be dirty, unwashed t-shirts. People in general also look like they are taking less care of themselves than they ought to. Now I know going too far the other way leads to narcissism, but the average Midwesterner looks like the "before" image on a makeover show.
That might sound mean, but I'm from the Midwest and I can say it! Also, that lack of care in personal appearance is the less savory outgrowth of one of the best Midwestern qualities: an aversion to bullshit. I am looking forward to a break from the status-obsessed Northeast.
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