When I think of low cost trips, I think about cutting corners on something I really want and settling for a subpar experience that is more difficult and less relaxing. But what if making the trip difficult is the entire point?
Hickman’s Hinterlands makes trips complicated on purpose, resulting in a low-cost experience that reveals the real world as it is, instead of a series of well-worn and curated travel routes filled with Instagrammers and tourists.
outside of the most dire emergencies and the most mundane sorts of tasks, it is always my policy to choose the least convenient, most ridiculous, circuitous route to travel from point A to point B.
For a trip through rural America, he set out to cross the distance entirely on public bus routes. This is not easy, and required pre-planning and the type of inconvenience more suited to explorers than vacationers. Rural bus routes in America aren’t well utilized, and therefore don’t easily link up. Yet they are used, and they are very much a part of America. The fact that many people can afford to bypass them doesn’t make them any less necessary.
On the bus that took us from Watertown to Lowville, the driver openly marveled at what a strange and unorthodox idea it was for anyone to attempt what we were doing. Yet, by the same token, she seemed pleased at our ardent enthusiasm for rural public transportation —
Kurt Vonnegut said that “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” It’s something I earnestly believe, because if you’re getting an itch to try something that is really unique, something is calling to you to break free of a bubble. And in the case of rural bus routes, it’s certainly an inexpensive bubble to break.
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