Columnist seeks hometown adventure

St. Louis seems bland to me lately. Jazz shows elicit less finger-snapping, the Arch appears less colossal and the toasted ravioli feels less crunchy since I spent my last two summers trekking across China.

Needing a cure for my doldrums, I yearned to interact in real time with a melting pot of personalities like I had done for three weeks in China’s youth hostels. Within the crammed pages of a guidebook, a youth hostel simply looks like another place to stay, albeit with an attractive price. Travelers quickly find that they’re paying for much more than a dorm bed — they’re experiencing cultural cultivation without booking costly tours.

In China, my personal “cultivation” involved guzzling $1 bags of Tsingtao beer, discussing photojournalism with Belgians, watching “Amélie” with a French tourist who had never seen the movie and cheering on a Mongolian tween in traditional dress performing her well-rehearsed moves to Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance.” And it was all thanks to the resources of China’s youth hostels.

I didn’t expect to find anything but Holiday Inns and Super 8s in my hometown, and their cold, contemporary décor and secure suites hardly create a vibe for comfortable socializing. A Google search, however, led me to the Huckleberry Finn Youth Hostel, located on a cobblestone street in the Soulard District.

Take a wedding, for example. It’s a great place to meet new people – for business purposes, of course.

Social events are a great place to network.

Today’s young professionals rely on networking. In fact, 85 percent of job-seekers’ success comes from networking, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. With formal weddings and social affairs, known as black- or white-tie, coming back into style, it is important to be conscious of what the opportunity entails.

If you’re traveling to such an affair, you’d better be ready so as to not embarrass yourself.

Like many other girls born in the era of Disney-style fairy tales, I have longed for my chance to be the belle of the ball. So, when asked to be a date to a black-tie reception, I realized that not only did I have a chance to dress up, but also to meet some influential people.

I figure our band got its start the way most bands do. 

One of my roommates had his guitar out, and the rest of us filed into his room demanding a live show. He played every song we requested – for more than an hour.

Jon kept interrupting Scott’s musicianship by reminding us all that he used to have a bass guitar in high school. 

“It was brown — no!  It was cream. With a fret board like Scott’s. My bass, that is.”

I scoffed, not only because Jon seemed to be lying, but because I spent years preparing myself for this type of bragging. I’ve mastered two legendary instruments of rock.

The piano and the trombone.

The only logical thing to do now was to form a group.

“I’ll just be the manager,” the last guy, Chad, decided. He only played the trumpet. In seventh grade. The rest of us would be music gods.

As a new and momentarily unknown band, though, we’d first have to get ourselves heard. And the best way to do that?

Hit the road.

Pee on the right tree, and your life changes.

Detours aren’t planned. Not by us travelers, anyway.

A true detour is a wild card. It takes you somewhere you never planned on going.

So, in the spirit of true “detouring,” I set out on this issue’s road trip with an open mind. No specific destination this time – just a full tank of gas, two cherry limeades, a Red Bull, bottled water and my worn-out travel atlas.

At noon Thursday – exactly when I was supposed to be in English class reading Steinbeck – I was driving to Iowa instead.

“Life is short. Take detours.”

The first thing you notice about Iowa is the absence of restrooms for hundreds of miles at a time. You’ll pass towns with names like “Waterville,” “Tanktown” and “Pedee,” but you won’t see a bathroom in any of them.

The second thing you’ll notice is a lone tree next to the highway whispering “pee on me” because you brought way too much to drink. Forty (or so) road trippers have peed on that tree.

Most of them will tell you there’s something inspiring about that frantic leak. As you’re shifting back and forth in mid-urination to stay hidden from traffic, you stop and enjoy that long overdue relief – nirvana for travelers. At that exact moment, if you listen closely enough, you’ll hear another whisper float down from the branches above you.

Instead of France, Spain or Egypt, try Missouri, Iowa and Illinois. There’s a plethora of towns in these states that chose to identify with world-renowned cities by picking distinctively cosmopolitan monikers. For whatever reason, the founders of these towns decided against assigning them more destination-appropriate names like Cornville or Hogtopia, perhaps thinking ahead to possible tourist implications. After all, wouldn’t you jump at the chance to hit up historic Brooklyn? Iowa, that is. No skyscrapers in this little corner of the Corn State.

It borders on ridiculous when you begin to actually compare some of these towns with their international counterparts. Take Paris, for example. The Missouri destination had a whopping population of an estimated 1,458 in 2006, not quite the millions you would find in France. I should probably give up on strolling to the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame, at least on this continent. Paris does have a church, St. Francis Cabrini, but that sounds more Italian than French to me.

Can’t get into Cuba? Neither can anyone else, unless you’d like to visit the lovely hamlet of Cuba, Illinois instead. There are many fabulous tourist spots to check out, including the Spoon River Public Library, where many valuable books wait to be checked out. Not exactly on par with Guantanamo Bay, but at least they aren’t ruled by a dictator.

Although I live in a large city, the phrase that comes out of my mouth most is, “There is nothing to do.” I, like most people, seem to think I have to travel to Chicago, St. Louis or Bora Bora to find something to do. I thought a detour had to be something everyone would find interesting, when actually, it just has to mean something to the explorer.

I got in my little blue Pontiac Sunfire to run errands, but when I finished I decided I wasn’t ready to go home. I wasn’t sure where I was going, and I didn’t care. I got on the highway and started toward my grandparents’ house. I turned onto the bridge leading into their little tic-tac-toe board of a town – but instead of going right like usual, I turned left.

The road had only a few scattered houses on it, and I began to hear the crunching of gravel under the tires. I played kickball back here as a child but never took the time to care about where I was. I pulled off to the side of the road and started walking. It had been raining, so the earth was soft under the few pieces of gravel left on the road.

Home is where the stomach is. That is the old saying, isn’t it? Perhaps not, but that sounds about right to me, considering that my hometown is Columbia, Missouri. Columbia is conveniently located smack dab in the middle of the state, halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis on I-70. It is the perfect place to stop for any type of food at any time of day. Because I’ve been a resident of Columbia since I was 2 years old, I’ve developed a pretty good idea of places locals would recommend.

Of course, Columbia hosts a multitude of chain restaurants that are pleasant to eat at, but why eat somewhere that can be found in any sizable city? I encourage you to step outside of your chain of chains and experience nationally recognized Columbia cuisine. Especially in the downtown area, countless locally owned restaurants serve cuisines that range from fast to fancy, burgers to Thai food. There is something for everyone — I promise you will not be disappointed and neither will your stomach.

Curious relatives and friends often ask me, “Well, what can you do there?”

I usually smile and say something about on-campus activities or the farmers’ market, to quaint laughter from my city-slicker, big-college acquaintances and family members.

They forget one thing: What students in small, ordinary-looking towns seem to lack in variety, they make up for in sheer creativity. The next time I was home, I had a better answer to the rehearsed question.

Traincatching.

“Train-what?” My father’s eyebrows lift slightly in amusement. “You stand on a bridge and wait for a train?”

Cups and saucers rattle as the employee of the coffee shop shoves steaming mugs of freshly brewed espresso on the counter. Flaky croissants filled with custard and topped with chocolate line the bakery display window, tempting the passers-by with their sinful perfection.
Things are different in Rome, Italy, in ways that a Midwesterner would never think of, swapping fries for farfalle and Coke for a glass of bold, rich Chianti.

First, breakfast. A croissant and cup of cappuccino are the norm, a far cry from my usual bowl of Corn Flakes or scrambled eggs. Pastries and coffee go hand-in-hand in Italy even though such a sugary breakfast goes against my healthy-start ideal. In Italy, breakfast is not the most important meal of the day.

Luckily, Italians believe in good food and eat it often. This is where the famed Italian fare that Americans know and love comes into play, although it’s nothing like the spaghetti and meatballs I’ve gotten from home. If you really want to go there, spaghetti and meatballs isn’t even authentic Italian — meat and pasta are rarely served together in the same dish.

The key to Italian cuisine is the freshness of ingredients.

Although that may not come as a surprise, there is much more to the idea of freshness of food than the average American would expect.

Buy in bulk? Think again.

The zoo is pretty cool, and for that matter, so are the art museums, the insert-theme-here festivals and the walking tours. But if I really want to see something worth remembering, I’m heading to the heart of a city — it's downtown.

It’s been a few years since I’ve taken part in a family vacation, but even when we were in prime tourist form and hitting up destinations all over the Midwest, I remember very few trips to the world’s largest peanut or the world’s most boring historical exhibit.

Maybe it was because we spent a lot of time visiting family, but it seemed that we always managed to find our way to where the locals were hanging out and away from the tourist traps. In fact, some of my best memories have been made in the places where I was brushing shoulders with the locals — seeing their private businesses and eating something other than the $8 theme park burger. I have snippets of memories that put me on street benches shoving homemade ice cream in my mouth, looking in tiny shop windows or marveling at ancient courthouses. You’d think the advertised attractions — the walk-through aquariums and the faces carved into bluffs — would be the things to stick in my mind, but oddly that’s not the case. It’s the everyday things, done just a little bit differently than what I’m used to, that my memory bank yanks out each time I reminisce about a Williams family vacation.

I understand that the point of a tourist site is to see something you don’t see every day. It’s a bit of knowledge or history concentrated into one spot and presented in a way that draws people in. But isn’t it also kind of cool to see something that you do see every day (like the local bank or courthouse), only somebody else’s version of that something? Nearly every city has a downtown, and it seems that this is the point from which the city grew. The oldest buildings, courthouses, brick streets, churches — they’re usually all there, interspersed with a couple of modern additions as well. I love a freshly built shopping center or a modern museum that pays tribute to some element of U.S. history just as much as the next person, but on the other hand, I feel almost like I’m in my own home when I know I’m truly in the middle of someone else’s.