One of my favorite things to do on quiet weekend afternoons is to plan trips. Sometimes this takes the form of digital exploring with Google Maps' little yellow street-view guide, and sometimes I draft entire (but very hypothetical) itineraries. I've amassed dozens of Google Docs and iCloud Notes with ideas ranging from art museums in Midwest cities to beautiful scenery in places where I'd likely be the only native English speaker. So, you can imagine the disappointment I felt as my 20th birthday approached, knowing that the past year of COVID-19 limitations on travel would continue to block the path of me and my Honda Accord for the time being.
Around early March, I had an idea. I knew I wouldn't be able to secure a domestic flight anytime soon, let alone an international one, but there had to be a way to bring a new experience to my own Ohio region. I texted a friend from high school: Want to backpack through Europe by driving through Ohio? Let me explain.
One of my online traveling rabbit holes had led me to explore Ohio's collection of art museums scattered throughout the state. I was working for a glassblower at the time, which is a story for another day, and I wanted to visit the Toledo Museum of Art to see its glass exhibits and studios. I was prepared to drive up and back from Cincinnati in a day, but then realized that I may as well stop in Oxford and visit a friend at Miami University, and I should figure out where I'd stop for gas or food and see what else I'd find on my route...and that's when I realized that in this hour of driving, I'd pass multiple towns named after European cities. And wouldn't it be funny to plan my roadtrip around that?
Obviously, any of these name origins across the globe have a far deeper history. Our country is relatively young, and Ohio has only been a state since 1803. Many signs welcoming drivers into the next city, village, or municipality denoted the area's founding date within the last 200 years. Nevertheless, I learned a lot on this trip by navigating roads I'd never been within a hundred miles of, and making small talk in most shops or cafés I entered, as I tend to do.
While my friend and I didn't hit every single European-named town in Ohio (we had to eliminate quite a few based on our route, schedule, and general safety), we did see a lot of them. Here's the full list:
Oxford (England)
Versailles (France, except it's pronounced Ver-sails)
Troy (present-day Turkey)
Saint Paris (kind of a stretch, but France)
London (England)
Dublin (Ireland)
Toledo (Spain)
Milan (Italy, except it's pronounced My-lin)
Medina (Spain, except it's pronounced Me-dye-nah)
Seville (Spain)
Berlin (Germany)
Warsaw (Poland)
Dresden (Germany)
Cambridge (England)
Athens (Greece)
Rome (Italy)
Manchester (England)
Moscow (okay, maybe not Europe)
And guest appearances by:
Coolville
California
Cincinnati, of course
Our four-day journey took us through close-knit neighborhoods, densely wooded hills, silent old towns, Amish country, farmland, industrial land, and riverbanks. As we drove, we marked our progress by how many hours of our enormous Spotify playlist we had listened to. Each town on our route had a specific destination, and we made sure to take photos everywhere we went. To be fair, many were of signs welcoming drivers into a designated municipality, or the local bank, just to prove that we were there.
But since you asked, here are some of my favorite photos:
Row 1 photo descriptions
Arc de Triomphe in Versailles (again, that's Ver-sails, nice try)
Toledo Art Museum, meeting up with my dad's high school friend Josh and his wife Marcy
Toledo Art Museum, light exhibit
Row 2 photo descriptions
Row 3 photo descriptions
Joking aside...I did learn a lot on this trip about what life in the Midwest looks like. I've lived in Greater Cincinnati suburbs for all of my life, so parts of this trip brought jarring experiences for me: homes scattered through the hills in Western Appalachia, with miles between them...river towns abandoned after the nearest factory closed, leaving the surrounding population jobless...
There were still, of course, well-off areas we passed through, discovering beautiful coffee shops filled with high schoolers studying for final exams, pop-up thrift stores on Main Street in small towns...that sort of thing.
Overall, this idea that began as a funny "Hey Ferb, whatcha wanna do today?" idea soon became an educational journey through the state I call home. It made me think about what could lead a once bustling downtown area to decay. It gave me a hunger to learn more about the pitfalls of suburban sprawl, of car culture (versus public transportation...a pipe dream for most of America!), and of the blind eye turned to rural areas. It made me glad to have spent my ten-day summer break between co-op and classes this way. Even if I didn't get to backpack across Europe, Rhonda the Honda and I certainly made some worthwhile memories together.
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