The magic thing about home is that it feels good to leave, and it feels even better to come back.
Wendy Wunder
Through middle and high school, I attended a series of travelogues with my grandparents hosted at the Dewitt Operahouse Theater, a single-screen movie house near where I grew up. One Tuesday a month during the spring, local couples (typically retired) presented a series of carefully selected 35 mm projector slides of their adventures—Greece, Spain, Napal, Egypt, Germany—to an audience of enthusiastic Iowans, many of whom I would bet had hardly left the state, much less the country.
As a young adult, I wanted more than living vicariously through someone else’s travels, and believed the only true success came from leaving home and seeing the world my family never had. So, I applied for an out-of-state college where I traveled overseas, and after graduation I took jobs that moved me across the country. I could only be someone if I was somewhere else.
There’s a steep learning curve that comes with traveling to unfamiliar places and interacting with new cultures, people, foods, and experiences, but it taught me an appreciation for just how different lives and perceptions can be depending on where chance deposits you at birth. (During my first international trip, I told a man in Rome I was from Iowa, completely unaware that someone in Europe might not have our geography memorized. As his face registered zero recognition, I became blatantly aware of my ignorance that my world—the US—might not be the center of his. “In the United States,” I muttered, my embarrassment metastasizing. Then a strained whisper, “It’s in the middle.”) I don’t regret those lessons.
However, the farther away I moved and the more I saw, the more I missed home. In the desert, I missed the Mississippi and the rolling, oceans of corn and soybeans undulating in the wind. In the south, years melted into one another without the drama of seasons. I missed snow.
It seemed the more I tried to make something of myself, the less I felt like myself. I introduced myself as an Iowan, as though my place of origin would explain everything with all the positive connotations I intended.
What I found was that if my home state wasn’t completely unrecognized—or on a shocking number of occasions, confused with Idaho—the only thing people knew about it were the harsh winters. To them, Iowa was boring, flat and bleak filled only with farmers walking around in dirty overalls amidst a never-ending reenactment of Grapes of Wrath, everything between the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers existing only in black and white.
A younger version of myself, sitting in that dark theater during mild spring nights punctuated by the intermittent click of a projector, thought the secret was getting out. Now, after 15 years of chasing exotic places and experiences, I’ve realized a different truth. There’s a reason we show pictures of other places instead of living there.
There’s an incredibly beautiful thing that happens when you travel; no matter where you go, you can always find people who love that place so much, they’ve chosen to spend their lives there. For me, Iowa—the Midwest—is that place, and whether I realized it or not, I’ve been planning its travelogue my whole life.
If you come for a visit, I hope you enjoy your stay, and that these places and experiences deliver you just a fraction of what makes me passionate about my home. If you’re just stopping through on the internet highway, I hope this page inspires you to get out and find those places that make you love where you’re from and where you are, and that you’ll share them with others.
The Cycling Cicerone 