On the Road to Chapel Hill, Off the Road Through Chile
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 11.27.05 | 11:12 PM ET
The Sunday travel sections feature a couple of fun road trip stories. In the Washington Post, Ben Brazil chronicles a drive through three music-obsessed college towns in the Southeastern U.S.: Athens, Georgia; Charlottesville, Virginia; and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Think of it this way: Without colleges, we would have no college towns. And without college towns, we’d be out a lot of great music. No Athens, Ga.? No R.E.M. Get rid of Charlottesville? Get rid of the birthplace of the Dave Matthews Band. Axe Chapel Hill, N.C.? Lose the launching pad for the piano tunes of Ben Folds.
These college towns are laboratories, creative enclaves where music bubbles, swirls and mutates into more infectious strains. They are the primordial ooze in which some of the best American music evolves—or, if you prefer, is created.
In the Los Angeles Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning auto columnist Dan Neil took a 16-day trip down the length of Chile, a country he calls the drag strip of nation states. “Chile is more than 3,000 miles long and no more than 300 miles wide, like a geographic plumb bob running along its own curious longitude,” he writes. “This gives the country a satisfying, almost irresistible sense of ordinal direction, of destination, of here to there-ness ??” a quality all road trips need.”
Email to friend
Twitter
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! Buzz
Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
