I am en route back to Columbus, Ohio. I am now in Atlanta – nearly there! I have been reading Roads: driving America’s great highways by Larry McMurtry on the plane.
I was interested to read the following on page 80:
Accordingly I pulled across the Ohio River at Wheeling just as the rising sun glinted in my rearview mirror – thirteen hours later I watched it sink into the plains, beyond the Kansas River at Lawrence. I spent the day in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, answering, at least to my own satisfaction, the question about where the Midwest begins. Its eastern edge would appear to be Columbus, Ohio, after which the great cornfields appear, and continue all the way to St Louis. Eastern Ohio still has the look of Appalachia, with narrow framehouses on steep hillsides, but after Columbus there are no hillsides, just the flat Midwestern plain. Columbus itself has grown a good crop of cornstalklike postmodern skyscrapers since I was last through it; it even produced a respectable traffic jam, though later in the day, at Kansas City, I was to see a really mature traffic jam, one that stretched for eleven miles; …
