I love the travel section in bookstores. Each thick, photo-filled guide promises a brief escape from the Midwest. I open the binding up wide and imagine it is a Boeing 747 departing CMH for a place far away. California! Mexico City! Morocco! This is what the travel section has taught us: travel takes place somewhere else. Not only that – travel demands expensive plane tickets, hotels, and lots of time off. 

I reject this notion of travel. Which is not easy to do when you’re living in the Midwest.

What I have adopted instead is a sense of being a stranger in one’s own land, of mystifying one’s own culture in a way that makes it new all over again. Take corn fields, for instance. There is nothing more boring that driving for hours through the great cornfields of the Midwest. But did you realize the unique, contingent nature of the Midwest farming economy? At no time in history has such fertile fields been systematically exploited to produce an excess of basic food, which is now exported around the world and used to make everything from soda pop to socks. These industrialization of farm technology in the midwest made possible the US’ own industrial revolution, freeing farm laborers to work in automobile manufacturing, finance, and higher education. I submit this to you: you can travel around the world and never see such a culturally and historically significant monument as the sprawling Midwest cornfields. Yet it is as mundane to us who grew up here as the crumbling Great Wall of China must be to those street vendors who sell vegetables in its waning shadow.

This is equally true of cities in the Midwest. In the past few years, Miranda and I have also adventured in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. 

We have also had the occasion of visiting Portland (Oregon) twice; Milwaukee; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C. (twice); Raleigh, North Carolina; and Wilmington, Ohio (countless times for family). 

I used to be fascinated with people’s responses when I told them I lived in Puerto Rico. “You live where? That’s amazing!” They would follow this by some remarks about how nice it must be to live near a beach or have year-round warm weather. This was all true, of course. But since I lived there, none of this struck me as particularly exotic. In fact, I often felt the reverse for my friends who lived in Columbus, Ohio. “You have sidewalks, you say? What’s that like?”

When I moved back to Columbus in 2004, I was determined to move beyond the nothing-to-do-here attitude and find creative ways to travel in my own flat, corn-bred part of the world. That’s when I started taking nearcations. 

Here are three great reasons to nearcation instead of taking a cruise.

You’ll save money

Lodging – You can get a 4-star hotel in Detroit for the price of a New York City hostel. No, seriously. Miranda and I scored the Omni Hotel on the river in Detroit for $60 a night on Priceline. We paid the same for Jazz on the Park hostel in New York City three years ago. 

Transportation – You can drive round trip to a nearby city for a fraction of the cost of flying to a more spectacular destination. 

Food – New York City has its Italian Village and San Francisco has its China Town. But have you ever tried authentic bratwurst in German Village in Columbus, Ohio? Or Hungarian cuisine in Toledo? Puerto Rican specialties in Cleveland? Middle Eastern recipes in Detroit? Not only can you find delicious, underrated bites all over the Midwest, you’ll pay a fraction of the price of a fancy coastal bistro. To top it all off, you’ll get down-home Midwestern customer service.

You’ll become a better traveler

The relative dearth of landmarks in Cleveland, Indianapolis or Akron can be to your benefit. To be sure, if the Midwest had a long-standing tourist tradition like Greece or Paris, you can bet we would find a valid way to make every street corner a monument to some obscure moment in history. (The first traffic light (Cleveland), the shortest road (Bellfountaine), and so on.) Instead, Midwest cities have scores of hidden treasures that you, the traveler, must work a little harder to find. I’m thinking of sunken gardens in Windsor, Junctionview Studios in Columbus, or the Andy Warhol museum in Detroit. Yes, you’ll have to do more poking around in the mud to find the gems, but you’ll become a much better traveler when you do make it to a major city. After honing my travel skills locally, I find myself much more capable of enjoying a trip to Frankfurt or Washington, D.C. For one, you learn the difference between tourist traps and everyday life. Secondly, you learn to enjoy the mundane experiences and feel less pressure to see it all. Lastly, you learn to appreciate that the spectacles which appear exotic to you, from the Eiffel Tower to the National Mall, are just part of somebody else’s daily routine. In other words, it makes you rethink what it means to be exotic.

You’ll become a more frequent traveller

Once you get over the psychological barrier that “there nothing to do in Columbus”, the nearby world becomes open to you as a potential travel destination. And since it takes significantly less planning and vacation time, any long weekend (or regular weekend for that matter) opens up the possibility of another adventure. Family vacations don’t have to wait until a single 10 day stretch in the summer; you can also take several trips a year. You’ll also benefit hugely from fewer administrative hassles. Being gone from your home for a two weeks is completely different than being gone for a night or two. You don’t have to put your snail mail on hold, you don’t have to set up an email response telling people you are away for the moment, you don’t have to get a house-sitter/pet-sitter/child-sitter, you can be confident your cell phone will work as expected, and you’re never far from friends and family in the case of a travel emergency.