You might want to take a look at Atlas Obscura Places map: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/all-places-in-the-atla.... For the US at least, it shows a variety of interesting and quirky sights in most parts of the country.

Yeah, not everybody lives in Switzerland or the San Francisco Bay Area.

I've been in many a road trip up, down, and across the Great Plains of the US, where I spend a full day driving only to arrive in a town and geography that looks the exact same as the one I woke up in that morning. Only the signs are different.

Would you mind sharing the general region where you are? Based on your criticisms it sounds like the US, but my experience is quite different. I have only lived on the West coast though, and we're quite spoiled with amazing natural beauty around every corner here. I had a great time road tripping around small towns in the northeast around Vermont and Maine though.

If you’re an American, I highly, highly recommend the book American Ramble by Neil King, Jr. The one-sentence summary is “a guy walks from Washington to New York” but he connects with history (and the present) at a walking pace along the way, experiencing much more than the typical Washington->NYC traveler.

I live in Texas, which is probably very similar to where you’re thinking of, and I could list off at least 10 different places within a 1 hour radius that should be visited.

What you're describing is really why the Backrooms is resonating with the kids today - the homogeneity of an environment and culture devoured by capitalism.

You are generally correct, despite the rebuttals in the reply comments to yours.

But I think the challenge here is that we can have great places if we do the following:

1. Focus on transportation and ways of living that focus on walking or taking a tram.

2. Create and support medium-density, mixed-use neighborhoods

3. Require good, sound architectural principles. When you think of Paris and those narrow streets or the apartment complexes in the best neighborhoods, we need those. None of this modernist bullshit or 5-over-1s made with recycled concrete. Use bricks, stone, and more. Incorporate design elements requiring skilled craftsmen, and pay for it.

Those 3 alone should get you most of the way there.

My final comment would be, when you're thinking about spending $5,000 - $10,000 or whatever on a big international trip to go look at some nice stuff in some other country, consider spending that money instead on your own home, or garden, or donate to organizations that maintain those things for you. It also doesn't have to be all or none, you can still travel, and still invest locally. Make where you live the kind of place you would have wanted to travel to. Gardens in Great Britain, for example, can happen where you live too you just need to spend the money and build and maintain those things... like they do.

The transit and transportation stuff is much more difficult to fix. Most Americans want a Jeep and suburban house and to wait in line and beep their horn at the Costco gas station and that's a tough hill to climb, but the 3 items I highlighted above are guaranteed to increase quality of life and lower costs long-term.

somehow I think of pickleball.

I find it also much more relaxing if you just go, with less planning, and more surprises. Travel as the wind takes you, that's it.

I read this 3 times to try to figure out why you were living in the library for 10 years. It sparked Roofman vibes.

all around me in the northeast are decaying little towns and attractions that used to be vacation getaways for the first half of the twentieth century.

they say that airtravel killed the catskills resorts (ala dirty dancing) because why spend a few hours in teh car when you could go someplace so much more exotic with a few hours on the plane? and now there's a second-wave killing it with social media travel photos. everybody feels like they need to travel to the same handful of farflung locales that have been deemed 'the best'. basically, people with the means to travel have decided that regional travel isn't cool enough to impress their friends, so they let it die.

i think that's a terrible mistake for everybody. people dont have a fun, affordable place to go on a little weekend jaunt. towns that could scrape by on their natrual beauty have been left to decay (and once there's no way to monetize the natural beauty, local development sees no reason to preserve it).

I admit I snorted when that was mentioned. It's frequently ranked as the most desirable place to live on earth.

Not to say the message of the article is completely without merit - there are things to see and do almost everywhere. But if I just get in the car and start driving I will 95% of the time find only strip malls and cornfields. Perhaps a suburban park with some trees.

I was looking for this comment. I share a similar experience. Everywhere I lived (Croatia, Poland, Switzerland, ...) it felt like there was infinite magical locations within 1-2h drive with a lot of natural variety (ocean, lakes, ridges, forests, islands).

I'm not so confident that would be true all over the world. Some places I've spent 3-4 weeks in the nature I got bored from the lack of diversity. Can only stare into dirt and sand for so long.

might as well be in Skyrim

amazing, thanks for sharing. I was curious if there's already a name for this local travel. Micro-travel or planless-travel are close. Mini retirements are another term I like to use. I heard from the Pathless Path book (I think), which is traveling for up to 4 weeks - it's not 100% related, but it is what came to mind when I heard Microadventures.

I ended up with an interest, since I was a toddler my parents tell me, that I cannot stay local for- wild cats. Unfortunately, I have to travel the entire globe to be able to see them in their natural habitats. But no matter where I go, there are always local birders, and locally to me there are tons of different birds. The only wild cats here are bobcats, which are very cool, but I've seen and photographed them a lot already. I wish I was interested in the birds.

Photography also works, or hell you can even photograph birds.

The Merlin bird ID app is eye-opening

Potentially geocaching too

I'd argue that that diversity you claim for Europe has declined greatly in the last couple of decades. Wherever you go, local young people have been following the same global social media for long years now, which has had a leveling effect. Even among the language diversity, what people are saying in their own languages is often calqued on English.

In the 1990s and early millennium, opposing globalization (especially Anglo-American influence) and advocating for local culture was a common position on the European Left. Today that has disappeared almost completely, so much that people are likely to perceive it as a stance of the far-right.