Have Blog, Will Travel

My very favorite request from the requests thread:

I would like to see The Great Matthew Yglesias American Road Trip of 2011. Spend at least a month driving around the country, seeing the sights but also talking with journalists, policy-makers, ordinary people, and anybody else of interest who might deliver some insight into their local situation. I think this would be a nice way to get some more perspective on the country, and also we the readers would benefit from you sharing the insights and new perspectives you get.

I love to travel, so I love this idea. Obviously the real limiting factors are the views of my boss (and, I suppose, my girlfriend) on the merits of taking this kind of time. For the record, here's one of those "states I've visited" maps:

Not so bad, I think. Plus though I would never count an airport stopover as having "been to" a place, I do think it's worth observing that the best airport lunch I ever had was in Memphis. Though of course looking at this state-by-state can be misleading. Norfolk and Clarendon may both be "in Virginia" but they're very different and even tiny states like Connecticut conceal very diverse experiences. Arizona is huge and I've only bit to a tiny part of it. So there's always more to be learned by going places, even places you've already "been to" in some sense.

Part of which is to say that I typically travel because someone's invited me to speak somewhere, and when invited I typically say "yes." Once early in my career I think I turned down a junket to Bentonville, which in retrospect was a mistake. Oftentimes student groups do this, and I'm always excited to do it. But for whatever reason, a very high proportion of the lifetime domestic speaking invitations I've received have been in Southern California and nobody's ever asked me to come to Oregon or Kentucky. But I'd love to go.