Road trip! Those two words conjure up a whole bushel of memories for me. I’ve had lots of great times on the road — as a kid, with my husband and daughter, with friends, and sometimes just on my own. I love singing with the radio, taking in the views, and coming up with the new ideas and perspectives that so often seem to happen on a long drive.
That’s why I’m excited about David’s and my upcoming American Rural Road Trip. We’re going to drive from Montana through Wyoming and Nebraska, into the “I” states (Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana), then drop down through Kentucky into Tennessee before heading home through Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, and that other “I” state, Idaho. And, who knows, we might even take a detour or two along the way.
We’re looking forward to talking with folks in small towns and rural communities about innovation, technology, entrepreneurship, and learning more from them about new ways to grow opportunity and prosperity off the beaten path.
Our affection for technology and entrepreneurship may be a little unusual, but tourism in off-the-beaten path places clearly isn’t.
Trends like agritourism, heritage tourism, authentic tourism, and the slow food movement all seem to support the likelihood of tourism growing as an industry in small towns and rural places. Joanne Steele from RuralTourismMarketing.com has wrote, “Times have never been better for adding tourism to a small town’s economic mix … Rural tourism is about small locally owned businesses that support families. Urban tourism is mostly about big businesses creating low wage service industry jobs.”
Let’s hope she’s right about rural tourism translating into locally owned businesses that support families. Because travel is a pretty big deal in the U.S. According to the U.S. Travel Association, U.S. residents logged 1.7 billion leisure trips in 2015. Travel is among the top 10 industries in 49 states (OK, who’s the outlier?), and $147.9B (yes, billion!) in federal, state, and local government tax revenue is generated by travel spending. Direct spending by resident and international travelers in the U.S. averaged $2.6B a day, the equivalent of $30,033 per second.
We look forward to sharing American Rural Road Trip stories with you. Hopefully, slower traffic will stay to the right, the weather will be mostly pleasant, we’ll see some sights, and make some new friends. And for anyone who’s out there driving this summer for work or pleasure, safe travels!