Slow travel & social media (part one)

Faithful readers of Desirable Roasted Coffee know I like to take back roads when I am back in the States. Small town America and blue highways are pretty much the best things I know.

I call it “slow travel” – not unlike “slow food.” It’s travel  savored in small bites: never more than three hours a day in the car, no more than an hour or so at a time, obligatory stops at just about courthouse square. The point: have no schedule;  invite serendipity; meet people. Reflect.

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Last summer, after spending 10 days enjoying the back roads and small towns between Atlanta and New York, I realized how much I had relied on social media to do this. TripAdvisor and Chowhound were invaluable, of course, for finding the best stays and eats along the way.

But one of my best experiences came from following a blog: David St. Lawrence’s Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County, Virginia. His posts about adjusting to, and loving, rural life in and around Floyd, Virginia (pop. 432) might seem like Mayberry 2.0 at first glance, but they were enough to take me there on a summer Friday night. When I left the next morning, I had enjoyed more good music than I had in a year (including the Toubab Krewe), seen excellent art and had met a raft of interesting people.

All of which helped me reaffirm my belief — newly discovered in my own move to a village on a remote island — that the good life is found in either a very small town or a very large city. All between is mediocrity.

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Friend Lee Hopkins and I are planning a “blue highways” trip this summer, during the first week of June, from Seattle to San Francisco. Five days to cover a fair amount of ground…. but, lord, there’s all that beautiful coast to see. And lots of small towns to enjoy and mediocrity to avoid.

Hopkins  and I have never been to the Pacific Northwest. So, naturally, we started banging the social media pipes for advice. Where to go? What to see? Do we stay in this town, or that one?

The response? Well, Twitter and Facebook friends piled in with useful advice.

But then a town started to notice.

To be continued…