There may not be much there in terms of individual must-see attractions, but my memory of the city of Luxembourg is of a very picturesque town cut through by steep gorges.
Have you ever been to the middle of the US?
I give you:
- the Rocky Mountains (Colorado/Wyoming/etc)
- Utah’s red canyons
- New Mexico/Arizona desert. And the food.
- the Great Lakes
I could keep going.
I know the joke about the flyover is funny, but you all can’t seriously be saying that the US from California to the East Coast is nothing but homogeneous strip malls, chain restaurants, and WalMarts. There are plenty of distinct and beautiful places. If you look at the US in terms of natural features, we’ve got Europe beat in the diversity game. Deserts, mountains, forests, rain forests, etc etc.
Nava - What do you mean, boring?? Sometimes we break up the cornfield monotony with a soybean field!
StG
Lots of Sweden is covered by forest; that’s pure drive through country. Endless forest for endless miles and damn is it boring to drive there…
The frequently maligned and forgotten-about South has a lot going for it as well.
– The Mississippi Delta, birthplace of the Blues
– The Shenandoah Valley
– Civil War battlefields, some of the oldest colleges and towns in the US, gorgeous antebellum homes, Civil Rights landmarks, big cities, small towns, seemingly endless beaches and forests and summer.
– Beautiful, decaying, decadent New Orleans with it’s Creole charm, amazing food, and jazz
– The Appalachians
We have fields of cotton so white that it looks like a blanket of snow. Almost every Southern state has its own variety of barbecue. The South is home to some of the most unique cultures in the US, including the Cajuns, the Gullah people, and the Mestee peoples such as Lumbees and Melungeons. Have y’all ever tried muscadine wine? Or joined a second line in New Orleans? If you write off any collection of states as ‘flyover country’ sight-unseen, well, that’s your own loss.
I wasn’t saying there wasn’t anything worth seeing in the middle of America (my brother lives in Mexico, MO - I think he’s worth seeing!), especially in terms of the landscape. I would absolutely love to spend a similar length of time driving a motorhome round America as I did around Europe. What I meant was that it’s all one country, whereas Europe is all different countries.
I have to disagree about Luxembourg, by the way. I like Lux city a lot, personally, but have you ever been anywhere apart from there? It may be small, but it’s fucking beautiful. Even just going for the places people have heard of, there’s Clervaux, Reisdorf, Esch-sur-Sure, Schifflange with its famous strike against the Nazis museum… it’s a really lovely country. (It also has perhaps the tastiest dairy produce and game I’ve ever experienced, which is a bonus.)
Is there a really blossoming Moldovian Tourism Board?
Do Oxford college students write in their notebooks the number of days left till they can finally flee to Liechtenstein?
Liechtenstein is also very nice. It has a capital city so small we drove right through it before we realised we were there, and had to turn round and go back. The mountains are striking, the Rhine just there is beautiful, the tiny city is amazingly well equipped (shops, cafes, art, nightlife etc.) and the people were very friendly, though we found the castle slightly disappointing. It was an interesting place to go, if only because it’s such an incredibly tiny (and double landlocked) country and yet so very much itself and noticeably different even from the neighbouring part of Switzerland.
We didn’t meet any students, Oxford or otherwise, but then it was during term.
Gotta love the Americans coming and listing their pretty things. Haven’t seen anybody sing the beauties of, say, Southern Illinois yet, though… to name a place where people were astounded when I said I found it pretty (and I did). When people talk about “flyover country”, it isn’t the Rockies or New Orleans.
Hey, I resemble that remark! I’ll have you know that it’s not that I’m scared of Bulgaria; it’s just that if I have a one-week vacation, I’d prefer not to spend 4 days of it getting there and getting back.
Fixed it!
With lots of nothing but fields or prairie in between.
Hey, pretty everybody agrees that regarding nature and landscape, the US is a wonderful country - one which Americans don’t really deserve, seeing how they treat the enviroment. Yes, people are envious of the Rockies and Monument Valley and all the other scenery that’s different from Europe, and that’s what would be worth the trip to travel to the US and see. But given all the other troubles going there and in the country, … we take the scenery we have over here, plus the culture.
But lack of modern tourist infrastructure is a very different aspect than the monotony of the flyover country. For many other tourists, the lack of infrastructure until the Eastern European /Balkan regions catch up means lower prices and far less crowding than in Italy or similar. Sure, many (dumb) average tourists want to go Ballermann 6 in Mallorca where everybody understands German, and you go the beach during the day and dancing at night while getting stinking drunk. Yes, there are enough jingoistic idiots who go to Italy because it’s sunny, but insist on eating their Wiener Schnitzel and speaking German like at home (and the Italians comply because so many tourists come). But that’s not all tourists.
Only once the white people showed up, they eradicated both the people and the culture that was there before. True, you can visit the animal burial mounds, but the culture and cuisine you see in a reservation are broken bits of a broken people trying hard to reclaim their heritage after being psychically destroyed for hundreds of years.
And that varied culture has been replaced by wal-marts and McDonalds and white people listening to right-wing radio and Fox, so thinking all alike.
Only if you want to get from point A to point B, or consider only cities several hundred years old worth seeing. Just like hundreds of people visit the mountains every year to go hiking, many people travel to Scandinavia to walk in the woods (with or without elks). You also have the option of visiting the Sami people who have adapted their way of life to modernity (althoug the global warming is harming them, too - the snow melts too early during their treks to support the weight of the animals, and rivers become unfrozen).
To answer the OP: No, I can’t think of any parts in Europe that would be strictly flyover. True, some parts in the East and North are more sparsly populated than cental and West Europe. But still, there’s either wonderful scenery /nature/ landscape everywhere, or old culture. We don’t have to come up with things like the biggest yarn ball or similar to attract attention among identical non-important small villages inside cornfields.
This is different from Bavaria how exactly? And if I lived in the cradle of the Third Reich, I might be a little more abashed in throwing around accusations of genocide.
But so much of Germany is cute! And they even rebuilt some of their cities back to their former cuteness after the recent unpleasantness…
Huge parts of Australia would qualify, I think. That’s not to say there’s nothing interesting outside the major cities (not true), but it’s such a big country you really have to fly to get anywhere more than a few hours away, and unlike the US much of the centre and far north of the the country is uninhabited.
You just don’t get that procession of small-but-interesting towns when driving long distance in Australia, IMHO.
People must have heard different uses of “flyover country” than me. Everytime I’ve heard the term “flyover country” it’s by the hipster/indie contingent and has nothing to do with scenery or tourist interest. It’s more of a NYC/LA/SF attitude that they’re much more sophisticated culturally and politically than the rest of the country. You would be hard pressed to name any country where the social/cultural elite in the big cities that don’t look down on rural residents or suburbanites to some degree.