| HN Mirror

I've lived in the southeast for 2/3 of my life, and ride my bike 10,000-12,000 mi/year, largely drawn in by charming rural towns. It's a lot of what keeps me engaged with the sport.

I would nevertheless agree with the parent to whom you are replying that they are the exception, not the rule, and much of rural America is depressed or just a whole lot of nothing, at least from the perspective of charm. Most places there, too, are built at automobile scale, and lack sufficient sense of placehood or definition to qualify as anything like a hamlet in the European sense. It's just a ZIP code with a Circle K, a church, and a some houses scattered over an obscenely large area that can only be traversed by car. Sometimes, boarded up historical relics are included, although you may have to drive quite a bit from the civic centre (the Circle K) to find them.

Food deserts, in which the Circle K feeds a massive radius (along with perhaps a Dollar General), are the norm. Getting from the Circle K to the Dollar General requires a car. In between, there's not much.

There are some delightful exceptions, and I love to visit and capture their splendid sights and sounds. They are few and far, and I find the parent's generalisation highly valid, at least as the Sourheast goes. I grew up in the Midwest and had a similar sense there. Perhaps the West Coast and New England are quite different, and it sounds like they are. "Flyover country" has little to recommend it in the whole, however, and there's a reason they call it that.