The Search for Stuckeyville

So, for many years, Kathy and I had been sort of thinking of taking some extended time off work to go on a long vacation, but it wasn't until recently that we definitively decided on the long cross-country road trip idea. We had toyed a little with the idea of doing a big tour of Europe or Australia/New Zealand. But in the past two years, a couple things inspired us a little more and got us more excited about the idea of roaming around the USA.

First, about a couple years ago, I happened to pick up the Bill Bryson book, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America. I picked up the book just because, as Kathy will attest, I'm a sucker for any TV show, movie, or book that takes place in an impossibly quirky small town like Stuckeyville or Stars Hollow. Anyway, this book basically chronicles Bill's travels cross-country as he searches for the perfect small town. Ironically, even though he never finds the perfect small town and actually finds that most small towns are either oddly tacky or boring, it really made me want to see all the places he was talking about and experience the tackiness and/or boredom for myself.

The other thing that recently inspired Kathy and me was the cheesy road trip scene in the movie Elizabethtown. This is also a little ironic because neither of us really liked the movie that much. But, toward the end of the movie, there's a long rambling scene where the main character goes on a solo road trip, guided by an ultra-detailed map given to him by his love interest, Kirsten Dunst.

The scene actually doesn't fit that well into the overall movie, but if you've seen it you know that it really does make Middle America look like this wonderful, quirky place to go out and explore. He visits a bunch of places that I don't remember now, but the one place I do remember that he visited was the Second Largest Farmers Market in America. Again, you probably won't understand unless you've seen the movie, but after seeing that movie, I pretty much wanted to go on a road trip just to see that farmers market. It was that awesome.

I kind of forgot about that farmers market until today as I was writing this, but just now I went on a long web search looking for the location of the Second Largest Farmers Market in America to see if it was anywhere along our route. To my huge disappointment, I discovered the Second Largest Farmers Market is completely and entirely fictional. Just like there's no town of Stuckeyville with a lawyer's office inside a bowling alley, and there's no town of Stars Hollow in Connecticut with a charming inn owned by a really fast-talking mother of a teenage girl.

Alas. I guess we'll go on the trip anyway.