There should be an obvious answer. Maybe it happens after a certain number of days. Maybe after you unpack your suitcase. Maybe after you’ve bought groceries, found your coffee shop, learned the bus route, or accumulated enough possessions in the bathroom that leaving would require more than fifteen minutes and a tote bag.

But I don’t think there is a clean border. Home seems to have one of those irritatingly fuzzy boundaries that I’m always fascinated by geographically. You can draw a line on a map and declare that one place ends here and another begins there, but lived geography rarely cooperates.

Accents bleed across state lines. Food traditions migrate. Neighborhoods change block by block rather than at the intersection where somebody decided to put up a sign. Regions overlap. Cultures seep. And apparently, so does home.

At some point after arriving in a place, you cross an invisible boundary between being there and living there. The strange thing is that you usually don’t notice yourself crossing it. You notice later that you already have.

Photo: AFM taking Chef out for a walk during her regularly-scheduled annual dogsit in the Vail Valley of Colorado

Home might just be a reduction in cognitive load

The first few days in a new place require an absurd amount of brainpower. Where is the grocery store? Can I walk there? Do I need the bus? Where does the bus even stop? Where can I get coffee? Is this neighborhood walkable in the way a normal human being uses the word walkable, or in the way Google Maps occasionally uses it while suggesting you cross six lanes of traffic beside a drainage ditch? Where do people actually go? Which bar feels comfortable? Which gym has the right atmosphere? Where do I put my stuff? Why does this kitchen not have a coffee maker?

None of these questions is particularly important. Together, they create the unmistakable mental static of being somewhere new. You haven’t developed muscle memory yet. Every ordinary action requires a decision.

Then something starts to change. You know which bus to take. You know how much you can realistically carry back from the grocery store without accidentally entering a strongwoman competition. You know which direction to walk without opening a map. You know which intersection comes before yours. You know where you like to sit. The place hasn’t changed. You have.

And perhaps home begins at exactly that inflection point: when geography stops requiring your constant attention. When moving through a place becomes automatic enough that your brain can go back to thinking about something else.

Photo: Running errands in Caye Caulker, Belize

The border moves one habit at a time

I think we expect transitions to announce themselves. Arrival. Departure. Moving day. The first night. The last night. We love a clean border.

Airports are particularly good at indulging this fantasy. There are literal doors separating arrivals from departures. Immigration booths allowing you to enter one country from another. Boarding passes telling you exactly where you are going and approximately when your relationship with one geography will end and another will begin.

Real life is much less cooperative. The border between traveler and resident doesn’t have a customs checkpoint. Nobody stamps your passport when the bartender recognizes you. There is no official ceremony the first time you stop using Google Maps. You don’t receive documentation when you develop an irrational preference for one grocery store over another.

And yet these things matter. The coffee shop becomes the coffee shop. The grocery store becomes the store. A particular walking route becomes my route. The bartender becomes someone whose name you know. You begin accumulating preferences rather than observations.

That distinction interests me. A visitor notices a place. Someone who lives there, even temporarily, starts having opinions about it. Not just there is a coffee shop on this corner. But I don’t like that coffee shop because the chairs are uncomfortable, so I go to the other one. Now you’re implicated. You have entered into a relationship with the geography.

Photo: Finally knowing which direction AFM wants to go without referring to the directional signs in Utila, Honduras

We manufacture familiarity

Hotels are a perfect example. I have a ritual that I never do when I’m actually at a place I might call home. When I’m staying in a hotel, I like to get into bed, pour a glass of wine, and watch Cartoon Network. I have no compelling explanation for this.

I am a 51-year-old woman who spends much of her waking life thinking about travel, consumer behavior, geography, writing, and whatever ridiculous rabbit hole has captured my attention that day. And yet put me in a hotel bed with a remote control and suddenly I’m twelve.

It feels luxurious in a very specific way. Not fancy luxurious. Hotel luxurious. And because I’ve repeated it in completely unrelated places, it has become a strange little piece of portable familiarity. The city outside might be new. The room is new. The view out the window is new. But this ritual belongs to me.

I’ve started to think experienced travelers don’t necessarily become unusually comfortable with unfamiliarity. Maybe we just get better at smuggling familiarity across borders. A morning routine. A particular kind of restaurant. A workout. A book. A phone call. A glass of wine and Family Guy. Tiny pieces of continuity that we scatter into new landscapes until the landscape starts connecting itself to us.

Photo: AFM’s odd hotel bed-wine-Cartoon Network ritual

This may be why slow travel feels so different

When you move quickly through a place, geography can remain mostly external. You see it. You photograph it. You taste it. You admire it. And then you leave. There is nothing wrong with that. Some places I have loved enormously without ever becoming remotely entangled with them.

But time changes the relationship. Stay longer and geography becomes more specific. You discover which bartender is friendliest. Which grocery store has the better produce. Which coffee shop looks appealing but has nowhere you actually want to sit. Which bus is reliably late. Which sidewalk freezes first. Which route takes three minutes longer but you prefer anyway.

The place starts acquiring texture that has absolutely nothing to do with what someone would put in a travel guide. And slowly, the relationship becomes reciprocal. You are learning the place. But the place is also accumulating evidence of you. Someone recognizes you. Someone knows what you drink. Someone asks where you were yesterday. The dog anticipates the direction you’re about to turn. Your groceries have a usual shelf. Your shoes have a place by the door. You end up on the front page of the local newspaper with the team you polar plunged with.

None of this is dramatic enough to qualify as a milestone. That may be precisely why it matters.

Photo: AFM somehow convinced the guys on her team to don her bikinis in a polar plunge fundraiser for Colorado Special Olympics

Geography is more impermanent than we pretend

We tend to talk about home as though it were a fixed coordinate. Where is home? We expect one answer. A city. A house. A pin dropped neatly onto a map.

But plenty of people have lived somewhere for years without feeling at home there. And plenty of us have felt an immediate, strange recognition in places we barely knew. I can feel at home somewhere I don’t own anything. I can feel at home somewhere I know I’m going to leave. I can have several homes simultaneously. And I can return to a former home and discover that the border has shifted again.

The streets are still there. The buildings are still there. But my relationship to them has changed. Maybe home was never the coordinate. Maybe it was the relationship. And relationships with places, like relationships with people, are not binary. They accumulate. They weaken. They deepen. They disappear. They return unexpectedly years later when you smell something familiar or drive an old road and suddenly know exactly where the next curve will be.

Home has soft borders.

Photo: AFM crossing borders on the Metro in DC. A place she once called home, and still occasionally considers it as such despite a once a year cat-sit.

So where is the inflection point?

I still want one. Some moment I can identify and say: There. That was when I started living here.

But I suspect that’s not how it works. Maybe the inflection point is simply the accumulation of enough tiny familiarities that the balance quietly tips. You wake up one morning and you’re no longer decoding the place. You’re participating in it. You know how the mornings work. You know where to go when you want company. You know where to go when you don’t. You have a route. A seat. A rhythm. A few people. A ridiculous little ritual or two.

The geography has stopped being scenery. It has begun holding pieces of your life. And that, perhaps, is the softest border of all. Not the moment you arrive. Not the moment you decide to stay. Not even the moment you call somewhere home. The moment a place begins quietly seeping into the definition of who you are while you’re there. One ordinary day at a time. Until eventually you realize you crossed the border some time ago. There just wasn’t a sign.

Apparently I’m not finished interrogating this idea either. It has started sneaking into the novel I’m writing, where the border between arriving somewhere and actually belonging there has become rather more complicated than geography would suggest.

And if you’re at the beginning of that process yourself, I also put together the practical version of this idea: How to Settle Into a New Place for a Long-Term Stay.

It covers the first few days: unpacking, groceries, routines, finding your places, meeting people, and all the unglamorous little things that eventually turn an unfamiliar dot on the map into somewhere you know how to live.

Photo: AFM settling into another place she will temporarily call home. With the help of a friend.

Photo: Back in the days when she had a home in Washington DC, AFM would host Friendsgiving every year for all the orphans who had nowhere else to go. Chaos definitely ensued and those parties have become legendary.

And the dishes themselves? They’re travelers with baggage. A whole cast of foods that migrated across America over centuries, bumping into each other, acquiring new identities, and occasionally committing culinary crimes (I see you, candied yams).

Here’s how this dysfunctional family of dishes ended up sharing a table…

Turkey: The Culinary Participation Trophy of Thanksgiving

Turkey didn’t have to be the main event. In early New England, it was simply convenient: big, bland, and gobble-gobbling around asking to be roasted. But then Sarah Josepha Hale, determined holiday lobbyist and perhaps the real OG of food influencers, aggressively campaigned to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, in which the “roasted turkey took precedence on this occasion”. Probably because you actually had to hunt it yourself, was it so revered.

Once railroads made it possible to ship turkeys across the country, the bird went national and we’ve been performing this annual ritual of pretending it isn’t dry ever since. We’ve basically gaslit ourselves into believing turkey is delicious. I mean, aside from turkey cold cuts, do we ever eat it any other time of year? The answer is pretty close to “fuck no”.

And true to the rumors of family in-fighting on this most hallowed day of overconsumption, our Thanksgiving hype-woman writes, in her chapter about Thanksgiving of all places in her book, Northwood or, Life north and south: showing the true character of both: “All true born and bred Americans, Yankees in particular, are fond of argument.” (I hope my ex, who used to call me The Contrarian” is reading this!)

Photo: The best turkey AFM ever ate was at a culinary school training-ground restaurant in Grand Junction, CO on Thanksgiving in 2020. Covid restrictions were still heavily in place, so she nearly had the restaurant to herself! No family holiday drama here!

Stuffing: America’s Longest-Running Regional Feud

Stuffing is where the country’s true identities leak out. New Englanders keep it stoic - bread, onions, herbs, and a Puritan sense of restraint. And believe it or not, oysters were often included as well because nothing says holiday spirit like briny mollusks in your carbs. But mostly because they were cheap and plentiful before turkeys were mass-produced and processed.

The South, understandably bored (or disgusted by that, like I am), invented cornbread dressing. “Dressing” which has everything to do with a stuffing-esque alternative and nothing to do with shoving stale bread up a dead bird’s ass. Cajun country serves up crawfish embedded in their old bread and veggies. Green chiles, piñon nuts, and corn masa for our friends in the Southwest.

This dish didn’t spread through cookbooks, it migrated via families dragging luggage and their opinions across state lines and making do with what their land and climate gave them. Stuffing is basically edible ancestral trauma, and that’s why we love it. Every version says, “This is where we came from, and no, we will not be negotiating it.”

But seriously, whose idea was it to shove stale bread up a dead bird’s ass to begin with?

Photo: AFM now typically spends her Thanksgivings with friends in Denver. We see the stuffing in the upper left corner. Or is it “dressing”?

Cranberries: Just Like Me, Bright and Cheerful on the Outside, Bitter AF on the Inside

Cranberries originated in cold bogs, which explains their personality. For years they stayed in the Northeast because settlers were busy complaining about how bitter they were and how much sugar cost.

Then came 1912 and with it, the miraculous invention of canned cranberry sauce by some rich guy who owned cranberry bogs and wanted to ensure his annual crop would not go to waste (and/or build an empire). That tube of jiggling joy (or horror) just delightfully slides right out of the can, fully intact with the can indentations defining the cylindrical blob. It spread across grocery aisles nationwide, because nothing moves through America faster than something cheap, sweet, and able to survive the apocalypse.

I’ve experimented with making fresh gourmet (read: bougie) cranberry sauces in the past. It was actually my favorite thing to make for Thanksgiving. There is something so satisfying about watching the cranberries pop as they are boiled down into a red mush. And playing around with different ways to sweeten the sauce - orange liqueur and ginger was my favorite. But yet only the canned shit would be what anyone would take from the cranberry offerings at the table. So either I really am an awful cook despite my pretentious go with the one fruit on the table, or the cranberry is yet another obligation, and is best served sliced and jiggly.

Photo: AFM watching the cranberries pop for her cranberry sauce. Cinnamon sticks give it a seasonal flair. Sparkling wine is a necessary accompaniment for watching cranberries boil

Mashed Potatoes & Gravy: Thanksgiving’s Power Couple

Potatoes are the great equalizer. They grew pretty much everywhere, survived nearly every kind of soil and climate (at least in the US), and were impossible to fuck up in cooking unless you really tried. So when Thanksgiving became a national holiday, mashed potatoes were already the people’s champion with no regional barriers to prevent anyone from enjoying America’s favorite Thanksgiving side.

It’s usually the one item on the table that literally everyone will have on their plates. You might skip the turkey because you’re vegetarian, or you might skip the greens because why even try to be healthy when you can leave room for everything else! But there is something very seriously wrong with you if you do not have the mashed potatoes on your plate, no matter how they are made. And let’s not ignore the fact that this is probably the one food on the Thanksgiving table that everyone has a strong opinion on. I’ll argue ALL. DAY. LONG. in favor of lumpy mashed potatoes. Ideally with a shit ton of butter, roasted garlic, and chives.

Gravy I include in this section, because even though we really make the gravy for the bird so we can pretend it’s moist, you rarely hear the words “mashed potatoes” on Thanksgiving without their sidepiece Gravy. Gravy is the duct tape of the Thanksgiving plate - whatever needs to be fixed will be just fine covered in it. Much like stuffing however, gravy recipes can also vary over geography with mushrooms prevailing in the Pacific NW or sausage making an appearance in the south. But I’m gonna give New Mexicans the real props here. They got it right with red chile replacing - or in addition to - the gravy!

Photo: Not fucking around with the mashed potatoes at one of AFM’s Friendsgivings. It’s the largest container of food on the table.

A Smorgasbord of Sides… or Successful Marketing Schemes?

Candied yams, just whyyyyyyy? Sweet potatoes thrived in the South long before they crashed the Thanksgiving party up north. With the Great Migration of African-Americans in the early 1900s, sweet potatoes became more prevalent on tables in the northern latitudes than ever before. And then Big Sugar had to insert themselves by publishing a recipe that paired a nutritious root vegetable with processed sugar pillows. That disgusting marshmallow topping? Marketing campaign. A marshmallow company in the early 1900s published a recipe booklet suggesting the combination. America as a whole embraced it immediately, proving we have never once passed up an opportunity to go full Def Leppard and pour some sugar on us.

Green bean casserole, yep, another marketing scheme that we fell for and a big win for Campbell’s. In the 1950s, one of the Campbell’s test kitchen leads was tasked by the Associated Press to come up with a simple recipe that included items that might be found in a typical home kitchen and easily prepared by the modern housewife. I hope she got a big ass bonus for her not-so-subtle contribution.

Greens. The type of green vegetable, semi-intact in its true form, found on a Thanksgiving table might differ across American geography. Brussels sprouts in the north and collard greens in the south are what first come to mind. But the fact that they didn’t succumb to a national marketing campaign probably only means one thing: they are the least sexy thing on the table. So go ahead, drench them in gravy and give them the love they deserve.

Pies: Dessert or Reckoning? Depends.

Pie is America’s holiday emotional support dessert. Pie is just as much about geography as it is resourcefulness. Our favorite Thanksgiving lobbyist Sarah Josepha Hale described the pie situation as such: “There was a huge plum pudding, custards and pies of every name and description ever known in Yankee land; yet the pumpkin pie occupied the most distinguished niche.” And thus began our love affair with the pumpkin pie - at least for one day a year. Little did she see this as foreshadowing into our national obsession with pumpkin spice everything. (Ahem: more marketing campaigns gone wild).

Pecan pie emerged from the South’s nutty resources (in more ways than one). And apple pie just shows up everywhere like an overachiever who needs constant praise. As families moved around the country, pies traveled with them—part love letter, part passive-aggressive reminder that someone’s grandmother “made it better” or “it’s not Thanksgiving without this”. As a result we still see some regionalism intact with our pie choices, as recipes were borne from local resources before national availability. But regardless of location in the US nowadays, you’ll be hard-pressed to not find one of those three contenders on your Thanksgiving dessert spread.

As someone who doesn’t have a sweet tooth and who will always pass on dessert (unless it’s a cheese board), I’m curious… much like turkey, do we even pie any other time of year?

The Meal as a Map (With Bad Directions)

From green chile stuffing in New Mexico to the unapologetically gelatinous Jell-O salads of Minnesota, the Thanksgiving table reflects a country both deeply regional and completely mashed together.

In Hawaii, turkey shares space with poke. In Louisiana, someone decided that stuffing three birds inside one another was a good idea and called it turducken. This is innovation. It’s resourcefulness. Or maybe it’s a big cry for help. Hard to say!

The beauty of the Thanksgiving table is that it’s a mess. A delicious, historical, often illogical mess. Look at your plate and you’ll see the story of America - indigenous agriculture, settler stubbornness, immigrant flavor, industrial shortcuts, regional quirks, and family mythologies all jostling for space. The spread is eclectic, contradictory, and a little chaotic. Which makes it the most American thing imaginable.

Drop a comment and tell me what’s on your Thanksgiving table.

Photo: Considered more a Chicago thing than a Thanksgiving thing, Malort always made a digestif appearance at AFM’s Friendsgivings. Somehow it became the true Friendsgiving tradition, and we don’t miss it!

But now I want to explore a food that on its own is universal. Pizza!

Pizza is everywhere. Italy and NYC, of course! But found even in sleepy surf villages in Ecuador or bustling alleyways in Kuala Lumpur. It is nearly impossible to go somewhere where you couldn’t have a slice. And what’s so interesting to me is that when you think “pizza”, it may be a very different vision than what I have. I mean, we all think crust, sauce, cheese, toppings - that’s the universal part. But the regionality of it may conjure very different images in our heads of what that means.

Photo: On a quiet rainy day in Bali, AFM decided some comfort in the form of pizza and wine was necessary. Owned by Italians, the pizza did not disappoint.

Every place in the US I’ve been to has its own version of the same idea.

New York: A thin crust strong enough to fold, stretched by the necessity of portability. New York is a city of movement. You don’t sit down; you walk. You don’t savor; you go. Immigrant bakers used the city’s mineral-rich water to create something that kept pace with the place.

New Haven: “Apizza,” charred and blistered, grew out of access to coal ovens and a culture of bakeries already accustomed to long-fermented dough. A working-class town made a working-class pizza — honest and unpretentious. Despite the short distance from NY, New Haven can seem worlds apart when it comes to a good thin-crust pizza.

(Sidebar: Should you want to go down the rabbit hole, Slice’s pizza blog breaks down the differences so beautifully.)

Chicago: Deep dish wasn’t born from indulgence so much as from practicality. Chicago winters are brutal. The food had to be hearty, sustaining — a meal disguised as a slice. Layers of cheese under the sauce protected the crust from burning in cast-iron pans. Geography birthed architecture.

Detroit: Automotive country created pizza in blue steel pans originally used for car parts. Oily edges, caramelized cheese, a square shape — the city’s industrial heartbeat literally stamped itself into the crust.

California: Fresh produce, sunshine, and a laid-back culture of “why not?” gave rise to pizzas topped with arugula, figs, goat cheese, and whatever else might be thriving at the nearby farmers market. Local geography turned pizza into a field trip.

Hell, pizza even has mountain-town versions baked in ovens that probably weren’t designed for pizza in the first place. I’m in Colorado as I write this, and there’s a local chain that calls itself “Colorado-style pizza”. What the fuck is Colorado-style pizza? I suspect the altitude affects the baking in some way, so I’m sure there is an element of capitalizing on that as a differentiating opportunity. Upon doing a little research, it has honey in the dough instead of sugar, and a braided, more “visually-appealing”, whole wheat crust. According to Wikipedia: It has some similarities to Chicago-style pizza, but is sweeter and has a shorter cooking time. Guess I should go try it sometime, even though the “sweeter” adjective is not terribly enticing to my own tastebuds.

Photo: AFM’s Denver favorite: Esters. Decidedly not “Colorado-style pizza”.

What fascinates me is how these styles aren’t random. They emerge from necessity, climate, culture, and industry. The availability of certain flours. The minerals in local water. The tools people had on hand. The pace of life. The temperature outside, the altitude at which it is being baked. These tiny contextual shifts baked themselves into identity. Even pizza has terroir!

Pizza is, in its way, an edible anthropology. If you follow pizza closely enough, you can trace the fingerprints of America’s geography and history through it — a culinary map drawn in crust.

In this day and age, it would be pointless to attempt to identify the inflection points of pizza; where the boundaries of one pizza style blur into another across the US. Mostly because our culture of convenience and ease of obtaining personal preferences allow a variety of regional styles to exist all across the country. In fact, it almost seems as if (smaller mom-and-pop) pizza shops don’t compete with each other directly. A NY-style pizza shop won’t even be in your consideration set if you have a hankering for a thick slice of Chicago-style pizza cake.

But it is fun to trace how pizza snowballed into what it is today. In 1905, Lombardi’s became the first licensed pizzeria in the US, residing in the Little Italy neighborhood of Manhattan. And from here we can begin to understand how the pizza virus spread, starting with NY style evolving into its many permutations that we know today.

By the 1940s, pizza had moved westward in geography and upward in crust height with Pizzeria Uno being credited as the first Chicago-style pizza. There seems to be many contrary accounts as to why it was invented, but the marketing gal in me gives props to those who saw a business opportunity, marketing around key differentiators - crust thickness and cheese/sauce order.

Photo: A late night slice in Greenwich Village, NYC. AFM might have gotten a little too crazy with the red pepper flakes.

What really moves me is how pizza is the sheepdog, corralling us home. It’s truly the one food that can bring everyone together because of its world dominance inspired by deliciousness, versatility, and convenience. Yet with so many personalities, everyone has an opinion on it. And with that, we can begin conversations with strangers, we can share stories with friends, we can comfort ourselves with a known entity. We can travel the world through pizza, no borders to stop us.

Photo: One of AFM’s regular pizza spots in Roatan. C-Level Pizzeria was originally owned by a guy from New Jersey, who then sold it to a local and passed along his traditional NY-style recipe. Not only is it one of her favorites on the island, but in the world!

And don’t get me started on my Minnesota friends who swear by pizza drowning in ranch. For all things that are holy, please make it stop!

Photo: A recent text exchange between AFM (green bubbles) and one of her Minnesota friends

Photo: Seen on one of AFM’s regular running routes in Alexandria, VA. She’ll need it after that above text exchange (sans ranch!)

A final footnote: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my playlist of songs about pizza. You might think I’m obsessed, but at least I’m not writing songs about it! Feel free to give it a follow.

Yeah, no shit. I worked hard to get rid of that accent when I was a kid. But I often get that comment from folks when they ask me where I’m from. And then for some dumb reason, I feel like I have to prove them wrong by busting out the old “pahk ya cah in Hahvid yahd”. I can still lay it on thick if I want to.

Some of you know from past posts that I moved down to the Tampa Bay area from the Boston area when I was a kid. But most of you don’t know that I had a wicked fucking thick Boston accent then too. And you know what? I didn’t know I had one either!

Photo: AFM probably learning more about not pronouncing her Rs and giving attitude than learning to bake. Bonus points for the extra attitude from her sister next to her.

Before our move down south, I had never even left the New England area during my cognizant life*, so I didn’t really know that I sounded funny to other folks. I mean, sure I would hear folks on tv or in movies that sounded different. Like southern accents, or just pronouncing words differently - like maybe actually using the “r” at the end of a word. But I just thought that it was a dramatic use of pronunciations for the sake of the storytelling and the screens.

So imagine my surprise when I started school in Florida in the 4th grade and everyone made fun of me for the way that I talked. Not to mention that I had a difficult time understanding a lot of the kids from the different races and ethnicities that I had not yet encountered. “Ethnicity” in the Boston suburb that I grew up in was pretty much either white Irish Catholic or white Italian Catholic. I think there were like maybe 3 Puerto Ricans in the town too. So actually landing in an area that was a “melting pot”, was so new and exciting and also definitely a bit of sensory overload on my young naive ears.

And when you’re 9 years old, you so desperately want to fit in that you’ll spend hours in your bedroom reading books aloud to practice pronouncing your “r”s and swapping out the soft “a”s for more nasally “a”s. It’s not a “bahthroom”, Angela.

While I don’t have much of a Boston accent anymore, there are definitely some words that I never lost. (Have you looked in the “mirra” lately?) And I absolutely fall back into it when I’m around folks with one. My friend Kira mentioned “accent chameleons” to me. And that is certainly the most appropriate phrase for this. Many people I know have mentioned that they tend to mimic an accent of someone while they are speaking with that person, especially if they had that accent or had been around it a bit in their past.

Mirroring is a pretty well-known concept in psychology, in which we tend to reflect back a person’s body language and cadence of speaking on a subconscious level in order to gain trust. Some people do it purposefully, in order to gain the trust of the person they are interacting with. Oddly - or maybe not so oddly as a behavior researcher - I’m super fascinated by the con artist and pick-up artist communities and you will find this technique in any of the publications written about how they can maximize their chances of getting laid and/or swindle you out of money. Even standard sales trainings will include this information. But most of us mirror others subconsciously, because as humans, we naturally want to connect with others we are interacting with for whatever reason we are interacting. Or at the very least we want to make the interaction as painless as possible, and our subconscious mirroring tells the person that I’m just like you, and therefore you can trust me.

Photo: AFM working hard to gain Tina’s approval. She was a tough cookie to earn trust from, but with the right amount of distance and mirroring, eventually she gave in

So of course, in the theme of this Substack, you can probably expect what question comes next. How does the inflection point of accents in the US work and how did they come about?

How did we move across space from one accent to another? In this day and age of having ALL the information ALL the time, I wonder if regional accents are slowly dying. But thinking about what existed before the age of 24/7 information, what was forming these inflection points? Using the example of Boston, for instance, we can typically pick out the difference between a Boston area accent** and a stereotyped New York City accent. There are many similarities, but I’m willing to bet that most of us would be able to pick out the two if spoken side by side. The two places are not far, only 4 hours drive from each other (sans traffic), yet they sound so different.

Or think about the difference between these and Midwestern accents, or Southern accents. Obviously there is history in play that create the regional accents stemming from those who immigrated (whether voluntarily or not) from other countries when the US was still growing up and outwards. But at what point and with what influence does the accent shift away from one epicenter of accents to the next?

Photo: When AFM spends time in Texas, she bartends at Ghost Note Brewing, and definitely catches herself saying “y’all” a lot more frequently

My hypothesis is that our natural human capability of mirroring has a strong influence here. As the country started growing, as immigrants originating from different areas of the world were adopting English, and as innovations allowing the ability to travel across the land and interact with others were becoming more widespread, it was natural to mirror those that we encountered the most, alongside retaining whatever accent we already had from our life experiences.

And despite technology allowing us to adapt to more national and global phenomena more easily than ever (like hearing other accents and vernacular in social media), it seems that we still have the capability to evolve while exhibiting some sense of regional uniqueness.

Photo: Despite getting rid of that Boston accent, AFM is still a Masshole at heart

*I was born in Tampa where my Mom’s family was, we then moved to Denver when I was a year old where my sister was born, and then to the Boston area when I was 2, where all my Dad’s family is.

**One of the things that pisses me off irrationally is a really bad fake Boston accent in movies/TV. It’s like fingernails on a chalkboard. See: The Departed. Seriously some of the worst fake accents ever, especially when they’re up against some native Boston accents. Great movie, but I just can’t bear to watch it.

I spent last week on a somewhat circuitous road trip from DC to Colorado. Rather than taking the most direct route, I like to take different routes each time I drive a long route. Taking I-80 on this trip so I could cross off the final state of the lower 48 for me to visit - Iowa. It was everything I expected and nothing more. No shade on Iowa, I had a fantastic lunch stop at Lua Brewery in Des Moines.

Moving westward across 80, I encountered my first Sinclair dinosaur (of this trip) in North Platte, Nebraska.

Photo: The first Sinclair dinosaur of AFM’s September 2025 roadtrip, in North Platte, NE. It’s also clear that she was in Nebraska with the Runza sign in the background.

But if you were coming from the opposite direction, going west to east, this would’ve been the last Sinclair dinosaur. The precise inflection point.

In 1984, my family moved down to Florida from Massachusetts. Since there was no internet, no mobile devices, nothing much to do on the way down there but look at trees and play Punchbuggy, billboards had a stronghold in grabbing the traveler’s attention. And one of the most successful advertising campaigns of I-95 was South of the Border. From 200 miles away in either direction on 95 of this hellish kitschy delight were loud, attention-grabbing billboards that you simply couldn’t miss. At first, you’d see them every few miles where they piqued the curiosity. The closer you got, the more of their billboards would dominate the landscape. Soon you would see them every mile or more as you were closing in, and with excited anticipation of what the next one would be, because they were quite entertaining (if not exactly the most PC thing in this day and age). I suspect they were way onto something about getting the kids’ attention to harangue parents into pulling over. I’m pretty sure we did! It was also located pretty much in the middle of nowhere, so you’d probably find yourself stopping there for a pee break, if curiosity alone didn’t lead you in.

Photo: An aptly themed dinosaur at South of the Border, seen on AFM’s December 2018 roadtrip. This is decidedly not the Sinclair dino, and therefore there was no confusion of where she was.

Now while South of the Border is a topic in and of itself, I won’t dwell on that so much. Where my curiosity leads is why was 200 miles the specific inflection point of their billboards? Certainly that interstate was significantly less built up 40 years ago than it currently is and there was a whole lot of nothing to capitalize on.

While I can’t find any information specifically on why the 200 mile mark is the inflection point, plenty of resources (and my fading memory) direct me to understanding that 200 miles north was the woods and tobacco fields of Virginia, with not much else between there and South of the Border at the time. It seems that this would be the perfect place to start screaming for attention, as you’ve now passed through the mid-Atlantic metroplex and there is literally nothing else to grab your attention.

The marketing funnel is fucking brilliant considering that they used marketing practices that are still widely used today, but without the same amount of information to provide the validation that the marketing is successful that we now have. Check out this graph that ChatGPT spit out at me when I asked for the South of the Border billboard strategy:

Buc-ee’s has appeared as the modern-day reinvention of South of the Border. But multiply that times 54! While South of the Border is just still barely in existence, Buc-ee’s is on a mission to win the highway rest stop game. With a nod to the billboard marketing practices that South of the Border used, and the cutest damn mascot ever, Buc-ee’s has become a must-stop for any road trip that passes by one.

The last time I was on a road trip where I was passing (and of course, stopping at) a Buc-ee’s, I noticed the same billboard strategy as South of the Border was used. Build awareness from further away with just a few signs every x number of miles, build anticipation, and finally close the deal with signage every mile. Much like South of the Border, the Buc-ee’s signs are entertaining and funny - if you get the humor. They clearly have Gen Z marketing staff, and I’m impressed by their reliance on the kids to do their marketing… not many established large companies will trust the kids to write their billboard marketing copy. And this is not just a sidebar or tangent that I tend to go on. The reason that is important is because once again, we expect the kids to harass the parents to pull over at this stop along the way. And who better to understand how to capture the kids’ attention but the kids themselves. Well played Buc-ee’s!

But I don’t see a specific inflection point for their marketing, presumably because there are now so many Buc-ee’s within close enough range to each other, that one does not need to market from 200 miles away like South of the Border did. That said, I do recall seeing a Buc-ee’s sign some years ago driving east through Louisiana on a road trip. I remember it caught my eye because it did say a number that was a long distance to Buc-ee’s with a U-turn indicator because we were going in exactly the opposite direction. Clever!

I didn’t make the U-turn. But maybe that’s just because I am a jaded market researcher who could resist the pull of the beaver. Or maybe I was on a tight road trip timeline. Or maybe because it was just a ridiculous billboard and they had the budget to pretty much say “fuck it” in marketing terms. Who knows? I love it though, so ballsy.

Eventually I did fall victim to the cutest beaver in America a couple years ago though. Because I was traveling through Texas, I decided I needed to finally bite the bullet and see for myself why this store has been growing at what seems to be an unprecedented pace for a fucking rest stop. The billboards definitely got me this time, and I’m not gonna lie, they have some ridiculous merch that somehow manages to pull off a high magnitude of ironic, yet un-ironic coolness. Think bathing suits with just the logo all over it.

Photo: AFM apparently was so in awe of her trip through Buc-ee’s that she didn’t take any photos. So here is a photo of her wearing a shirt she couldn’t resist buying while at said Buc-ee’s stop. Even marketing folks get sucked in by good marketing too!

Soon they’re opening in Ohio and Arizona, which in one sense, makes me kinda sad that they may eventually lose their Texas/Southern US identity. I won’t be able to assume I’m in the South anymore when I see a Buc-ee’s sign.

So in the opposite vein of South of the Border, where they mostly lost their business to having just one outdated (and overpriced!) location, Buc-ee’s seems ripe to grow in business. But will they be able to differentiate themselves enough to continue to draw customers like they were able to as a niche or regionally-based business? Do inflection points of signs and businesses even matter anymore?

Sometimes all you need is to offer gas and a dinosaur statue to know where you are. But will the beaver make the last existing dinosaurs go extinct?

Photo: AFM on the final leg of her September 2025 road trip, where the Sinclair dinos were king

711 breweries! This map captures most of them, but not all, due to some closures over time.

Photo: Static map for visual reference, as of August 2025. The linked map above is an interactive and up-to-date one

What I love about this map, besides all the great craft beer that I’ve drank, is that it tells a story. From this alone you can deduce where I’ve lived, where I’ve simply just traveled through, and where I have yet to go.

You can even visualize my road trip from this past summer:

I suppose these are the things I do when I have a severe case of writer’s block. Maps are more fun anyway! I’m working on populating each entry with the years I visited and any photos I have from each one. I’m hoping to eventually get it to a place where others can collaborate in some way as well. Maybe use as a guide where folks can share their stories and memories of their visits. Perhaps I’ll even tell some stories soon…

Cheers y’all! 🍻

Photo: AFM enjoying a quick break at Copper Trail Brewing on her summer 2025 road trip. Enjoy the journey!

*You can also follow my instagram @whereintheworldamidrinking. Hit me up for some stickers.

I’m sitting at a hotel bar in Salina, Kansas on a road trip that will take me from Denver to Miami. The bartender and I connected over the fact that we both lived in the Fort Myers, FL area for a bit. Long before Hurricane Ian had destroyed much of Sanibel Island, he was bartending at a restaurant there that I had visited a number of times, but not enough for either of us to recognize each other.

Photo: AFM beginning the long drive across Kansas on a 2019 roadtrip

A few folks come and go, I’m just sitting there enjoying conversation with the bartender and whoever else has sat down next to me over these past couple hours. Just one more beer before I make my way back to the room to tuck in before a long ass drive the following morning.

An older, larger man wearing overalls and a white t-shirt sits a few stools down from me. For the most part, very plain looking for this corner of the world that is a major crossroads for truckers. But there is something unnerving about him that I can’t quite put my finger on. Luckily I was far enough away that I could just mind my own business and not feel inclined to start conversation. Out of the corner of my eye, I can feel him continually looking over my way. Trying my best now to focus my attention on anyone in the complete opposite direction, that’s when the bartender walks over to me and whispers those words.

Seriously bro? I mean, it’s not implausible, given that this little town is the trucker capital of the US. Apparently this guy is a regular a few times a week, according to the bartender. But something doesn’t sit right with him either. So that’s just my cue to go to bed. And in such a sneaky way that he doesn’t even notice that I leave and in which direction to my room.

And this story has a completely anticlimactic ending, in that nothing further happened. I woke up and got on the road to my next destination after a good night’s sleep. Although it did take me a little while to fall asleep. The whole point, really, of this story is a friendly reminder to pay attention to your gut. 

Who knows, maybe this guy is a genuinely nice guy who never did a damn thing wrong. But I don’t need to go out of my way to prove that to myself. 

That’s just the thing about intuition. It can be difficult for ourselves to act on our intuition, even though we’re all pretty good at recognizing it, because there’s no “proof” that anything is wrong. But sometimes our intuition gives us weird little clues that are tough to recognize as it is talking to us. 

I now spend my winters on the island of Roatan, off the coast of mainland Honduras. A lovely and magical little slice of life in my opinion, but like anywhere, it’s not without its issues as well. On the whole, it’s a pretty safe place, but shit can happen anywhere. The first year I was there, I was living up a dark hill. Not much for crime had been reported in the area, and the woman who owned the place (and also lived on site) assured me it was very safe. After all, she had moved there from Italy 30 years ago and built the place herself. So I paid no mind as I came and went. 

Photo: AFM enjoying a beer at the local brewery in Roatan

One evening - not too late, like maybe 8pm-ish, I was walking home from hanging out with some friends. Another typical night, nothing felt off. As I’m slogging up this dumb hill, from behind a little utility building pops out a guy holding a knife. Then out of a bush pops a man holding a gun. They push me to the ground, take my shit, and scurry off into the jungle. Not a huge deal here, it was over pretty quickly with minimal damage (well, physically at least, the stuff they got and the logistics of making do without was the painful part, that’s a whole other story that you can read about on my website). 

But what is wild is that in retrospect, there were a few intuitive downloads that I noticed without connecting the dots at the time. About halfway through my walk and maybe about 5 minutes prior to the robbery, I heard a gaggle of girls who sounded kinda drunk and loud and obnoxious not too far behind me. My initial thought was “ugh, I should speed up so they don’t catch up with me.” But then something changed in my thinking, and I actually stopped in my tracks for a moment as I decided that it was actually quite comforting to hear. But the voices went down the road in the opposite direction and I continued on. 

Looking back, I think my intuition knew something was up the road for me, and wanted me to go find those girls. 

The other thing I notice as I look back was how I had absolutely no regard for the guy with the knife. He was holding the knife so awkwardly and almost seemed scared to be doing what he was doing. Now I’m not gonna fuck with a guy with a knife regardless of how he’s holding it, but what my automatic, in-shock self did - after laughing at him and saying out loud “ what the fuck dude?” - was to just keep on walking like nothing happened. My intuition was telling me so much that this guy was not a threat, that I just kept walking right past him as he stood there, probably also thinking “what the fuck”. I guess that’s why he needed back up!

Now not all intuition is preparing you for bad news! Sometimes it’s telling you to be present for the positive things too. This is a story from LOOOOOOOONG ago, but it also ranks as my favorite small world story to tell because it’s just too damn wild.

Back in the summer of 1995, vintage times here, I had dropped out of college for awhile, living in a shitty little apartment in the student slums of Boston, and working 90 hours a week. I shit you not, 90 hours a week mostly because I was broke as fuck, but also because some of the jobs I did were things I was truly passionate about and couldn’t turn them down. Sundays were my only saving grace. The one true boundary I allowed myself was never to accept a Sunday shift. Let’s just say I had a lot of energy back in my 20s. 

One Thursday, the store I worked my night shifts in was completely dead. They were cutting folks and I was happy to go. Finally a quiet night in to myself! But being the social creature I am, that didn’t last long before I was calling folks to see what was going on for the evening. (Calling, because this was before mobile technology and texting and social media). My friend Elizabeth, who lived one block away from me, invited me to come on over to her place, where they had a Real World watch party every week. At first I poo-pooed this idea because I thought the Real World was mindless drivel and a waste of brain space. No thanks! But something kept telling me to go hang out regardless of what they’re watching.

As I walk in, about 10 people are gathered around the tv and there’s a festive atmosphere. Apparently in this episode, I’m told by the group excitedly, one of the main personalities Jacinda, who is a supermodel from Australia, is having her boyfriend visit. So I roll my eyes, grab a beer, and squeeze myself in on the sofa, ready to watch this spectacle.

The show starts and in walks Jacinda’s boyfriend. Before anyone can react, I jump up and yell, “Oh my god, that’s Paul!” Everyone is just looking at me like WTF. And not a few seconds later, does the narrator mention his name, and sure as shit, it’s Paul.

Who TF is Paul? Paul is a kid who I sorta knew from high school who would end up living with me for 3 weeks. The high school I went to was also a magnet school for the arts and seemed to attract some interesting folks. Paul was a rich kid from LA who ended up at the school because his parents placed him in some fancy rehab nearby that also had a connection with the art school. Paul really hated the rehab facility and how they treated the kids living there, so he decided to run away. I didn’t really know him just yet, but he had somehow heard through the grapevine that my house was a safe space for folks who needed to get away or lay low for a bit. My mom worked overnights and my dad was out of the picture, and so the house I grew up in came to be the gathering spot for friends, parties, and weird shit. It’s pretty amazing that we managed to not burn the place down!

My home was very modest, but I did have an extra bed in my room. And for the next few weeks I grew a cute little friendship with this quiet artsy kid who would keep to himself most of the time and play me lullabies on his guitar every night while drifting off to sleep. (Don’t worry Mom, he was very respectful!) And honestly, I wonder if he really needed to be in that rehab center or his parents just wanted him out of their hair for a bit.

I don’t recall the actual situation, but at some point they picked him up during school and shipped him back to California and I never heard from him ever again. So imagine my surprise just a couple years later when I saw him on the television screen on that one random night I actually had a night off and decided to go watch a show I hated all because my gut was telling me to go hang out with this specific group of friends. 

And ask me now how I feel about mindless reality tv!

Photo: AFM tucking in to watch some bad reality TV. Mostly because the cat she was watching requested it! 😜

Photo: Enjoying the Minneapolis neighborhood bar vibes

When out of the blue, someone comes on a loudspeaker to announce that the meat raffle would be starting soon. Excuse me?? WTF is a meat raffle and why is it happening in this random non-descript corner dive bar? My friends, all locals to Minnesota, didn’t even bat an eye. How could anyone be so chill about what I perceived as the utmost in random shit?

Not just a Minnesota thing, I’ve discovered, but very much a Minnesota thing. A meat raffle is precisely what you think it is. You buy numbered tickets for what is typically a charity cause. The numbers are placed in a jar and pulled out. If you have the matching number, you win the meat!

Raffles themselves are nothing new. I most frequently see them at baseball games or at general charity events, and usually the prizes tend to be things like gift certificates or even cash. But meat??? Why meat? As it was explained to me by my friends, there are different cuts of meat being offered, and usually the first winner gets to choose the cut they want, and then the second winner can choose from the now available options and so on. 

But seriously, why meat over anything else that one could raffle off? Like say, something more practical and non-perishable? And you know what? Nearly all of the people I asked about this, when asked about “why meat?”, responded “why not?”

My friend Dawn, who grew up in Minnesota, mentioned that people in the midwest are obsessed with meat. Sure, but I would argue that a good portion of Americans in general are obsessed with meat. So I wonder if this has more to do with a utilitarian perspective. Thinking about all of my friends from the midwest, particularly in the Minnesota/Wisconsin region, they all seem to have this sort of lowkey, unpretentious, independent, get-shit-done kind of ethos. 

Perhaps the meat IS the practicality here.

Photo: AFM and her Minnesota friends watching the meat raffle go down at their local bar. For the record, AFM didn’t participate, but she very much enjoyed the weirdness of it all.

Since we’re talking about taking your chances in bars, another distinctly upper Midwest tradition that I was exposed to for the very first time was pull-tabs. When I was driving through Minnesota, I saw a few stores (mainly gas station stores and liquor stores) advertising that they had pull-tabs. Given the context of the store, my brain made a snap judgment that it was referring to beer can openings. Honestly I thought it was kinda odd that anywhere would advertise that, but I really didn’t give it much thought.

It was in the same visit to the bar with the meat raffle, that one of my friends said “they have pull-tabs here”. Again, Dense Me didn’t really think to ask anything about it and we all continued on with our conversation. A couple days later, I was with some different friends in Wisconsin in one of their little local watering holes. A very true Wisconsin dive vibe: it was like a casino in there, all sorts of slot machine type games lining the walls, sports memorabilia hanging from the ceiling, all kinds of people swearing up a storm at the bar. And my friend Keesha looks over and says “they have pull-tabs here”. Deja fucking vu! 

Photo: AFM on a tour of dive bars and bar traditions in Wisconsin with her Wisconsin friends. Notice the walls lined with gaming machines, because I bet the bar isn’t making much money with all their drink specials and chances to win free drinks!

She gets up, walks over to the pull-tabs machine - it looks kinda like a slot machine and a dispenser machine of some sort. Puts in some money and returns with a handful of palm-sized cards. Maybe a handful is not generous enough. She had two hundred of them! She distributes them between herself, her husband, and myself like I know exactly what to do. Sitting there confounded, I watch as they start to maniacally tear apart these cards.

Each card has 5 rows. And you peel open each one up to see if you won. Think scratch-off ticket style game meets slot machine but it feels super old school, because you’re peeling, or rather pulling, these tabs open to reveal a line of three items. AHA! That’s what a pull-tab is!! 

And as usual, I didn’t win shit. But pulling the tabs was actually quite satisfying!

Photo: AFM’s losing hand of pull-tabs. She definitely knows she’s in Wisconsin when a cheesehead is represented!

So what’s the story with these, and why do they only seem to exist in this little northern corner of the country? Turns out they’re legal in the majority of states, but perhaps that’s a newer thing?  I’d hate to think I’m not that observant after traveling the majority of the country as a bonafide barfly. (Now that I’m away from the region, I’ve been keen to look out for these and haven’t yet seen them anywhere else.)

And while we’re on the topic, I’ve got one more upper Midwest bar tradition for you. Dice games for drinks. There were two in particular that I encountered: Shake of the Day and 6-5-4 (aka Ship, Captain, Crew).

At the same bar where I enjoyed losing at pull-tabs, was also where I encountered Shake of the Day. In fact, I thought it was something that only this bar did. Given their penchant for offering all sorts of ways to lose money, maybe this was some sort of peace offering. Well it turns out that nearly every dive bar in the state offers this, but in many different incarnations. Each bar will select a number for the day, and typically you have three tries to shake five dice in a cup with the hopes of landing only that number on all dice. Some bars allow you to “farm”. Meaning that if the number turns up on a couple of the dice, you remove them from the cup and now shake only the remaining dice for the remainder of your rolls. Others might give you a discount or small prize if you roll other numbers or combos of numbers. 

As usual, I didn’t win shit. But it was fun to try with such an enthusiastic crowd! It kinda made me feel like I was at a winning craps table in Vegas, but in a rustic dive bar!

Photo: Keesha trying her luck at the Shake of the Day in her local watering hole. Much to the crowd’s dismay, she didn’t win.

Funny enough, 6-5-4 was something I first encountered just the other day after passing through the upper Midwest. It was at a lodge bar in the Red River Gorge area of Kentucky. But the bartender that introduced it to me was from Wisconsin. And what do you know, just as soon as he offered this up, in walks a small family reunion who saw what was going on and got very excited. Because they were from Wisconsin! And they called it Ship, Captain, Crew. Same rules, same game, just known as either. 

Much like the Shake of the Day, you have five dice that you shake in a cup in hopes of getting specific numbers. In this case, you want to get a six, a five, and a four. And the two remaining dice are effectively your score. You can farm your dice for your subsequent rolls. If more than one person gets a 6-5-4, then the one with the highest score in the two remaining dice is the winner.

And guess what? I finally won something! A free shot of bourbon. Sadly I’m not really a bourbon drinker, but hey, when in Kentucky, I’ll take my regionally appropriate winnings for what it’s worth! 

Photo: An exuberant crowd after AFM won her bourbon shot from playing 6-5-4

(Photo: AFM finding her happy place during a trip through Wisconsin in 2016)

Now mind you, I had heard of them. But I wasn’t quite sure what the difference was other than they looked like little poppable mozz stick bites with perhaps some slightly different breading. And these ones I ordered were served with ranch dressing. Nothing indicated this on the menu, so clearly it was a default that I wasn’t aware of! What the actual fuck? Everyone knows you eat fried cheese with red sauce. So perhaps you can imagine the confusion that ensued when I asked if they had any red sauce for my cheese curds. I was looked at like I had five heads and promptly told that “sorry we don’t have any red sauce”. As someone who is pretty meh on ranch, I was bummed but moved along and tried to enjoy my curds the best I could.

Having somewhat forgotten about that episode and the idea of dipping cheese into more dairy based products like ranch, I was reminded this past week as I’ve been on a road trip through the upper midwest. Not only are cheese curds on nearly every menu I encounter, but they are all served with ranch. WHYYYYYYYYY?

(Photo: A post-hike snack of cheese curds in Spearfish, SD on AFM’s current 2025 road trip. Notice that is definitely not ranch for my dipping sauce. I asked them nicely if I could have one of the salad dressings on offer instead of the ranch listed on the menu for my dipping sauce. While they looked at me like I was crazy, they obliged. Garlic parmesan was actually pretty good with the curds!)

What I didn’t know is that a major distinction between cheese curds and mozz sticks is that the cheese in fried cheese curds is traditionally cheddar. Not always the cheese you think to pair marinara with (though I’m a total red sauce whore and think it’s delicious anyway). But I’m still struggling to understand the concept of adding more cream to curdled cream, rather than something a little more acidic to cut through the fat.

And that’s why we need to talk about ranch dressing. Ranch dressing is one of the most American things to exist. It was invented, if you will, in California as the iconic Hidden Valley Ranch dressing. Yet it tends to be associated most strongly with the midwest. And I honestly haven’t given it much thought until I was bombarded by a lack of dipping and dressing options on this portion of my road trip.

I mean sure, you’re definitely gonna find ranch as a dressing option anywhere in the country. And you’re also gonna likely find it as a dipping option throughout the country. The big difference I’m defining here is that it is usually listed as an option anywhere else. Not as the main attraction or only option, particularly as a dipping sauce.

I was talking to a chef in Rapid City about this and he attributed this to exposure at a young age. Ranch being a main staple in even the most mundane things, like snack break in elementary school: ranch was served with carrots to all kids in the public school where he grew up in the midwest. I asked a couple friends from the upper midwest as well about their thoughts and they also agree that it was a staple. According to my friend Traci, who grew up in Minnesota, ranch is “required” on lettuce. My friend Erin, who grew up in Wisconsin wasn’t sure if it was a midwest thing or an 80s thing.

Good point Erin! Growing up in St. Pete, Florida in the 80s and early 90s, ranch was not an uncommon thing. In fact, I fucking loved me some Cool Ranch Doritos. Add in some Mountain Dew and that was my high school breakfast of champions. (The thought repulses me now!) Ranch was one of the most common dressings for sure. I have fond memories of going to the 24 hour diner on the beach with friends in high school and ordering fried broccoli and mushrooms with ranch. 

But again, I want to highlight the difference between ranch-as-an-option vs ranch-the-one-and-only.

It seems the answer lies somewhere in the supply chain and logistics of shipping food in mid-to-late 20th century. Believe it or not, Do317 sums this up perfectly (as they should, being an Indiana rag): “We’re spoiled now by lightning pace of modern logistics, but there was a time when the Midwest was flavorlocked by the inability to get anything to Indiana that wasn’t grown locally, and that meant things had to be canned, frozen, or shelf-stable. The west coast had sushi in the 70s and 80s, while the average Hoosier diner wouldn’t taste a non-questionable slab of raw fish until the 90s.”

Add in your usual high-ticket marketing from major CPG companies aimed especially towards working class folks who needed tasty, yet unspoilable, food products that could be made and served in a flash, and we have a winner.

(Photo: Behind the glass in a focus group facility. AFM moderates many focus groups in one of her current lines of work. I wonder how many taste tests and focus groups were conducted in the making of Big Ranch?)

My road trip started in Denver. Decidedly not midwest, though with plenty of midwest influence. Too cosmopolitan to attribute any major regional force here. My route took me up through Scottsbluff, Nebraska, into the western Dakotas and it was on this route that I started seeing the prevalence of ranch as my only option for dipping sauces. 

(Photo: First stop on AFM’s current road trip was Nebraska. Only ranch prevailed.)

Currently in North Dakota this week, I’m making moves east through Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois before I head south for a bit. I’ll be paying extra attention to where the inflection point of “only ranch” vs ranch-as-an-option-among-many occurs as I travel across and through the region.

(Photo: Passing through Fargo has AFM on guard for any woodchippers.)

“Only Ranch” sounds like a website I could make some money from 😂

400 cheeses! You might be wondering “how can there be so many damn cheeses?!?” Most folks are familiar with the factory-made generic “cheddar”, “swiss”, “brie”, and whatever other grocery store packaged slices come to mind.

Photo: AFM cutting the cheese for the annual American Cheese Society competition

Cheese, much like wine, is a product of its environment, or terroir. The term terroir is often used in the context of talking about wine and where the grapes were cultivated. The soil texture and composition. The amount of sunlight the vines receive. The amount of moisture in the air and soil. The temperature and the variations of temperature of air and soil. These are all contributors to “terroir”, greatly influencing the tasting notes and mouthfeel of a wine. Experienced wine tasters can tell the difference between say, a pinot noir from a specific region in Oregon versus a pinot noir from a specific region in California because of the role that terroir plays in the grape growing process.

But in case it’s not obvious, we don’t grow cheese like we grow grapes! 😆

So how is terroir relevant here? That saying “you are what you eat” actually means something when it comes to cheesemaking. Terroir doesn’t affect just grapevines, it can affect anything that grows from the earth. For instance, the grass that cows are grazing on in a valley meadow in Switzerland is significantly different than the grass the cows hanging out in the Azores alongside the salty ocean air are snacking on.

Photo: Just look at this beautiful cheese plate! Paired with sour beers, instead of wine, at Goed Zuur in Denver. Beers and spirits are also driven by terroir and make just as fabulous food pairing companions as wine does.

So when our favorite cheesemaking animals digest their earthy meals, the nutrients get absorbed, along with the flavor components found in their sustenance. Much like us! Have you ever noticed that your pee might smell like certain foods after you consume them? TMI but I definitely notice this after I eat seaweed or pineapple. (You’re more likely to find these nuanced flavors in cheeses made with unpasteurized milk, as the pasteurization process basically boils the subtleties away.)

The reason I bring all this up is because the idea of terroir fits so neatly into the concept of geographic inflection points. Where do these spatial boundaries occur and why? The obvious answer is what we discussed above - soil and climate conditions for starters. But then there are designated regions that indicate where something has been produced. The most famous example of this is Champagne. All Champagne is sparkling wine, but not all sparkling wine is Champagne. The grapes must be grown in the specially designated region of Champagne in France in order to be called Champagne.*

Photo: A flight of sparkling wines from Heath Sparkling Wines in Fredericksburg, TX. Not Champagne, but some of the most delicious sparkling wines I’ve had from the US.

Cheese also has similar designations around the world. One well-known example of this is Gorgonzola. In order for it to be called Gorgonzola in Italy and throughout the EU, it must have been made from cow’s milk within the Gorgonzola DOP (Denominazione di Origine Protetta - or Protected Designation of Origin, also known as PDO), which is comprised of a handful of specific provinces in Italy.

So while tasting your way around different regions is incredibly fun and one of my favorite ways to spend a day, what’s even more interesting to me is how these regional or place-specific boundaries can be drawn. Like, what if you have a farm literally on the other side of the DOP boundary. You’ll likely have the same type of grass, the same breeds of cows, the same atmospheric and soil conditions, yet this delineation means that the peripheral farm cannot reap the benefits of the designation. Did someone taste their way around the perimeter of the region and say “no, this doesn’t yield the same nuances as the farm next door”. Probably not. So why does this geographic inflection point occur specifically where it is drawn or determined (like using specific provinces)?

It’s like gerrymandering, but for deliciousness! 🤣

Photo: AFM harvesting grapes for Seventh Son Vineyards in Wimberley, TX - part of the Texas Hill Country AVA

Check out this map of wine regions in France. Zoom into the Loire Valley (indicated by the tan coloring). My initial thought is WTF. Look at all that speckling! Why isn’t it one coherent blob of tan? Why are there some places without the tan color just nestled in between the tan coloring? The arbitrariness of this drives me fucking bonkers! Who decides this? 

Looking at the terrain in Google Maps, I can’t find any convincing evidence to help me understand these boundaries. No mountains seem to be in the way, preventing growing areas. However, if we dig down a little deeper, we see that the region itself is comprised of smaller AOPs (French version of DOP/PDO mentioned above) that spotlights the unique qualities of each “micro-region”. But again, this begs the question, while we have plenty of information at our fingertips as to what each region offers in their wine, where is this inflection point that exists where the lines are blurred between regions?

Photo: Screenshot of the Loire Valley in France from Google Maps. Traveling east to west will offer some significant differences in wines across the region, even though the smaller regions are grouped together as one happy “Loire Valley”

While I like to occasionally pitch myself as a wine expert among those who don’t know anything about wine, in reality I’m a huge impostor and will immediately fall off my high horse when I’m around true wine experts. Cheese is where I won’t bullshit you. But for the sake of this discussion, I will stick with wine examples here, because it is much easier to illustrate this conundrum. In the Loire Valley, there are two famous AOPs that reside directly next to each other: Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé. Both of these AOPs are known for growing Sauvignon Blanc grapes, so why do we have two separate designations? Because I am a pretend wine expert, I will allow the real wine experts to answer this one for us, from Decanter: “Pouilly-Fumé tends to be a little broader, softer, slightly less vibrant and aromatic than Sancerre. It can have a smoky character, especially those from flint (silex) soils, though this can also be true of Sancerre grown on flint.”

Back to the question… what is driving the inflection point between these two regions and thus the very subtle difference in flavor profile? In this case, it’s a little bit easier to answer than other examples. We have the Loire River running between the two AOPs, defining this boundary and providing more of a finite cutoff in boundary, rather than a gradual move to an inflection point. Here we are looking at a difference of how the river and soil can interact with the microclimates on both sides: Sancerre being on the “Left Bank” or western side of the river, Pouilly-Fumé being on the eastern side of the river. Limestone and some flint rules Pouilly-Fumé, whereas Sancerre sees the addition of gravel into the limestone. 

Ok easy peasy answer, right? Nope! Let me bore the fuck out of you some more and take the example a level deeper!

Focusing solely on the Sancerre AOP now, it turns out that there are three different general categories of soils classified within it to make things even more confusing. To be fair, these soils do change across the geography of the AOP, so it’s not all willy-nilly, but why not make a clean break and just separate these areas into three separate AOPs? Especially given that there are more noticeable differences in some of the wines as a result of the soil and geography.

Chalk this up as a future research project that I can undertake to move east to west in Sancerre, tasting my way across the region to first hand taste how the wines evolve over space within these set boundaries and discover the true inflection points. Or maybe you, dear reader, can provide a first-hand account?

Photo: AFM properly tasting wine at Noble Riot in Denver

*Location is not the only driver of a designation. Production methods and specific products play a role in many designations as well. And, to make things more confusing, the US does not necessarily observe these labels as the EU does. Since the US is not bound by the EU laws, and we’re so invested in selling, selling, selling, we will call some sparkling wines “champagne” or some cheeses by their PDO names when, in fact, they were factory made. Check your labels for the designation if you want the real deal. Or ask your friendly local cheesemonger!

**If this has inspired you to enjoy a Sancerre, may I recommend a cheese to accompany your selection? Stay local and go with a cheese direct from the Sancerre region: Crottin de Chavignol. But really, any soft-to-semi-firm goat cheese will work nicely, if you’re limited in selection. (Finally I’m staying within my lane and not talking out of my ass!)

Photo: One more gratuitous cheese plate photo. Welsh Rabbit in Fort Collins, CO was an unexpected gem for AFM on one of her road trips

(Photo: Another gorgeous sunset in West End, Roatan)

Travel, to me, is about connecting and building community. Of course there is the benefit of seeing interesting new places and learning about other cultures, but I’ve found that “fast tourism” as opposed to “slow travel” can be really fucking lonely. 

Now mind you, I am speaking only from a solo traveler perspective. My nomad journey is just myself, and while I occasionally meet up with friends for shorter travels, I very rarely agree to this.  Many folks travel with others and can more easily avoid feelings of loneliness through having this immediate companionship (although not a guarantee!)

(Photo: AFM enjoying yet another road trip by herself because she prefers to travel without other people’s restrictions)

But traveling via “fast tourism” doesn’t allow for any time to build meaningful connections and community. In fact, it seems more focused on how much one can cram into a single place. No time to stop and smell the proverbial roses. Fuck those roses, let’s just collect as many items as possible on our list so we can post it to social media for bragging rights, is how I perceive this kind of travel. I’m not trying to invalidate any short-term type of travel here - this doesn’t apply to a two week vacation or a weekend trip with friends. If that’s all you can do, get after whatever makes you happy! This argument is targeted directly to those who are actively living or planning a location-independent lifestyle (aka homeless by choice).

(Photo: Stopping to see the street art, but not to smell the roses in Penang, Malaysia. An amazing trip, but a very lonely one because I was participating in “fast tourism” on this trip)

The case that I want to make here is that when you stick around a place for a longer period of time, the world opens up to you just that much more. Walking down the street, people begin to recognize you and say hi. You find a local bar or a gym and start to meet the regulars. Even the grocery store clerks or restaurant workers begin to remember your name. It’s these little things that can help assuage any feelings of loneliness upfront, and provide the basis for developing those more meaningful connections. 

(Photo: AFM spends time in Denver every year for cat sitting and to train and reconnect with friends at one of her favorite gyms)

Roatan has become a regular spot for my winters over these past few years, and it’s all because of the community, perfect weather aside. Some places you may feel as if you just fall right in, and this little island does that for me. So why not just stay? Despite how much I love being here, the antsy nomad in me is always ready to move along - whether that’s to explore somewhere new, or to return to another place I’ve grown to love because of the community and connections I’ve built.

Another case for “slow travel” over “fast tourism” for those who choose to live a nomadic lifestyle is that burnout is a real thing. In the eight years that I have been a nomad, I’ve seen countless overeager nomads take on travel like it was a professional sport. The blogs, the YouTube channels, the social media posts not only showing all the highlights with gusto, but also the amount of work going into producing these takes for sharing just exhausts me thinking about it. (Maybe I’m just old!)

And then over the course of a few years, or even months, I’ll see these same folks announcing that it’s time to go back home and settle down because it was just too much for them. Again, no shade to any decision each individual makes for themselves. But that exhaustion could have easily been avoided by slowing the fuck down and smelling those damn roses!

(Photo: AFM smelling the grapes while she helps with a wine harvest during one of her regular cat sits in Wimberley, Texas)

The beauty of living a nomadic life is that you have the freedom to call a place home for awhile. You can give yourself the luxury of having a Netflix night in without feeling like you’re wasting precious travel time. There is less of an urgency to go out and do all the things in just a couple days. You have the luxury of building a routine that you wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to do in a fast tourism way of life. Working, going to the gym, meeting with friends for dinner, and being able to still do all the tourist things in a given place is now available to you in the context of slow travel.

Eight years ago, I embarked on my dream of living location-independently. At the ripe age of 50, I am considerably older than the typical lifestyle nomad (but I see all you mature nomads too!) At this age, I regularly get asked when I plan to settle down, or worse, get told that I can’t do this forever. The truth is that I don’t think I ever will settle down. I do plan to do this as long as I am a fairly well-functioning human being. I stay healthy and active, and don’t feel my age like many of those who are my age report to feel. Despite how freeing this lifestyle can be, it also requires a lot of planning and logistics due to the complexities of not being in one place permanently. But as someone who loves to plan and project manage, that’s half the fun. While a nomad lifestyle is not for everyone, the idea of staying in one place for more than, say six months, even in places I love, for me sounds like pure torture. 

Hope to catch you somewhere along my travels!

(Photo: Packed and ready to go! Everything AFM owns fits in the trunk of her car. )

*I’ll write a future post about managing the complexities of nomadic living, covering everything from domicile status and mail to doctor visits and health related issues to even what the fuck to do with your car while out of the country for an extended period.

(Photo: AFM’s car Pepper had a series of electronic malfunctions on a road trip from Denver to Miami in 2020. Even though it was a brand new car! Almost missed my flight to Ecuador that year.)

This time is different. I’m currently in Honduras, on my favorite little island of Roatan. When I arrived here in May, I expected to get the standard 90 day tourist visa upon entry. But since I had just been here for the winter, I got a lecture from the immigration officer about how I visit here too much for too long to just be a tourist anymore, and need to start pursuing residency. Then she only stamped my passport for 60 days.

(Photo: AFM celebrating submitting her Honduras residency application. Cheers!)

Now I could’ve extended my time here easily. But then I realized that this was a blessing in disguise. That the universe was giving me an opportunity to play with this outcome. And as I started thinking more about this geography passion project, I recognized that I could now use the month of July to embark on a leisurely road trip across the country and start exploring. Start researching in earnest. I can now take a more circuitous route back east and see some parts of the country that I have not yet been able to explore.

The long distance road trip in the US has become such a staple of Americana that it has become a rite of passage for those who love to travel and among those seeking something - usually themselves. What else can really force you to turn inward and seek answers than driving hundreds of miles across a lonely desert? What else can open up your world than seeing the landscape change over a thousand miles or more and stopping in a local watering hole to hear fresh perspectives? I have a friend in Lithuania who told me it takes 3 hours to drive across his country. Using that for context really puts into perspective just how large the US is, and strengthens the idea of traveling your own country for fun. I mean, it takes 8 hours to travel east/west through Kansas alone - unless you’re on a cannonball run! Don’t even get me started on 1-10 across Texas!

(Photo: “Only” 880 more miles to go taking I-10 through Texas on this 2018 road trip from Phoenix to DC. AFM prefers to set her cruise control at the speed limit and enjoy the scenery.)

Expanding and becoming more popular with the advent of the interstate system in the 1950s, Americans started taking to the road more and more for vacation purposes, as it was cheaper and more accessible than air travel. Goofy landmarks, national parks, funny accents, and novel foods beckoned. Over time, however, we began to lose a lot of the cultural regionalisms that existed to larger corporations such as fast food restaurants and big box retailers. With such big money, these companies could offer the same things as mom and pops but at a significantly lower price, and the other thing just as American as a road trip is always wanting more for less. Just look to American meal portion sizes as a testament to that!

(Photo: 2017 road trip took AFM through Amarillo, Texas to marvel at the utter wastefulness and brave souls who had undertaken the Big Texan 72oz Steak Challenge. Eat 72oz of steak, shrimp cocktail, baked potato, salad, roll, and butter within an hour and it’s free.)

All that said, due to the size and geography of the US, we can still find plenty of regionalisms around. Some quite visible, others more latent, but the fun is in uncovering those along the way. During my road trip next month, I’ll be traveling from Denver up through the Dakotas, east across the northern states, and dipping down into the southern parts of Appalachia, before I re-route north and land in the DC area. I’ll be exploring in depth the changes of the landscape, the regional wonders and points of pride, the accents, the food, and of course, the main star of this show - the inflection points of where these are all occurring. I do hope you’ll join me for the ride!

(Photo: AFM in her current car, Papaya. Hop in, it’s road trip time!)

I created this Substack to explore an idea I had over 25 years ago that I never acted on, but never forgot about either. Mostly because I’m lazy as fuck when it comes to writing. I’m much better at sharing my ideas in a bar with strangers and letting the conversation unfold organically. (And I’m hoping that this exploration won’t become too obsolete this late in the game).

(Photo: AFM yapping at strangers in a bar, per usual)

When I was 9, my family moved us from the Boston suburbs to Tampa Bay. We spent 3 long sweaty summer days packed in a Ford Escort with vinyl seats and no AC hauling ass down south (it was 1984, AC was still a luxury in cars!) But I had never left New England prior to this and on this road trip I had become infatuated with the change in landscape, the different fast food and grocery store chains (Piggly Wiggly anyone?), the accents of the folks we encountered, and the new variety of foods that we had never eaten as insular Massholes.

(Photo: AFM and her sister easing into life in the Sunshine State)

I am deeply interested in exploring the geographical inflection points of language, of food and drink, of the landscape, and even of pop culture and current trends, particularly within the American cultural and physical landscape. Taking the soft drink example even deeper - this is not just about where does one say soda vs pop, but homing in on those “soft borders”: where the “soda” people meet the “pop” people and what is the phenomenon that influences someone to say one or the other along these messy lines.

Another example: Driving northwest along Route 93 through Arizona on a road trip to go see the town of “Nothing” (which really was a town of nothing, no false advertising there), I saw one lone Joshua Tree. Then I saw a couple more. And then BAM, it was a Joshua Tree forest. But all I could think of was the poor lonely solo Joshua Tree that I first saw. Why did it set up shop there? What are the influences that create a ripe environment for just one lonely Joshua Tree? What causes this soft launch of a border, if you will? How do these “soft borders” or these geographic inflection points come into play?

(Photo: The town of Nothing, AZ from aforementioned road trip)

Ok, one more example: Grits. These days, you can pretty much find grits anywhere. But they’re primarily known for being a staple food in the Southern US. Where does a place become “southern enough” that you will consistently see grits on a menu? And what are the factors that reduce its presence as you move away from the epicenter of restaurants serving grits?

Meet me back here for occasional road trip thoughts, stories of interactions with others on my travels, and of course, the main contender: musings about geographic inflection points. Cheers y’all!

(Photo: AFM, once again, sitting in a bar ready to yap and not write)

*For the record and not seen in the map shared in the intro, I spent my early childhood in the 70s/80s in a Boston suburb, and we called soft drinks “tonic”. Nowadays I only hear my grandparents use that term.

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