If you really want to get to know a city, you have to walk its streets and go where the locals go. And this past week, I was reminded that if you really want to understand a country, you can’t fly over it. You have to drive through it. Mile by mile. Town by town. Coffee stop by coffee stop.
This week I flew down to North Carolina and drove my youngest daughter back to New York from college. We crossed seven states in ten hours.
I’ve made this drive many times before, but this trip felt different.
Partly because my youngest daughter is getting older, and I know these kinds of trips become less frequent over time. But also because, strangely enough, of AI.
Lately I’ve started using ChatGPT to plan travel. I gave it our timing, destination, and goals, and instead of routing us onto the usual highways packed with tractor trailers and traffic, it pushed us onto quieter roads curving along the edges of Shenandoah and through small towns I probably never would have seen.
The trip started at one of our favorite coffee spots in North Carolina. An old Airstream trailer serving coffee that could compete with almost anything in Manhattan. There was a long line outside filled with people who clearly cared about craft. About quality. About atmosphere.
The trailer was covered in stickers and symbols reflecting causes, identities, and beliefs that felt very far removed from what we would see a few hours later and a few states north.
That’s the thing about driving through America. The country doesn’t change all at once. It shifts gradually. The architecture changes first. Then the accents. Then the churches. Then the flags. The way of life unfolds before you can fully explain it.
As we crossed deeper into Virginia, we passed modest homes with front porches and old barns sitting against rolling green hills. History felt really close there. Especially the Civil War. The land seemed to be carrying the memories.
Then we stopped for gas and wandered into Buc-ee’s.
If you’ve been there, you already understand.
It felt like someone took a Costco, crossed it with a truck stop, a theme park, and a county fair, then made it ten times larger. People were buying brisket sandwiches, fishing gear, fudge (guilty), inflatable coolers, and endless amounts of merchandise with cartoon beavers on it.
The coffee section was more like a frostee and smoothie stand. I took a hard pass.
It was absurd. Excessive. And kind of amazing. Buc-ee’s felt like a giant monument to American excess and enthusiasm, all packed under one roof. And people were loving the experience.
What struck me most wasn’t the spectacle itself, but how different it felt from where we had started only a few hours earlier at the Airstream where the coffee was carefully brewed and thoughtfully sourced. Here it came frozen, oversized, and packed with sugar.
Different tastes.
Leaving Virginia and heading toward West Virginia, we saw the largest Confederate flag either of us had ever seen flying in the distance behind us.
And everywhere we drove, there were expressions of identity and patriotism. Flags hanging from porches. Painted barns. Signs in front yards. Symbols of belonging.
Same country. Different priorities.
As we got closer to New York, the farms in Pennsylvania slowly gave way to denser suburbs, wider highways, bridges, and finally the skyline of Manhattan appearing in the distance. Home.
And then it hit me how enormous and complicated this country really is.
We spend so much time talking about division now. Red states and blue states. Cities and rural towns. Different values. Different worldviews.
But driving through America feels very different than reading about America.
Most people are simply trying to build lives that make sense to them in places they love, surrounded by people who understand them. Most people are just trying to get through the day, raise their families, drink their coffee the way they like it, and feel some sense of meaning and belonging.
The value of driving through seven states in a day wasn’t discovering how different we are, but realizing that despite those differences, we’re still traveling the same road together.
We pulled onto our street just before midnight. Happy to be home.
And standing in my kitchen the next morning, making coffee exactly the way I like it, I felt something I probably don’t appreciate enough.
Gratitude.
Not just for home, but for the privilege of moving through a country this large, this divided, this imperfect, and still somehow connected enough that you can drive its entire spine in a single day and never once stop feeling like you belong to it.
Let's do this-
Shaun
