Ilaria's Wanders Around The World

“Why would italian tourists want to go to this God forsaken usually frozen hell hole called State of Ohio?” asked us the owner of a motel. What were we getting into to stop our wanderlust? We were road tripping through Indiana to get to Ohio, a state whose identity is kind of unknown, and that was exactly what we wanted.. we wanted to see a side of America that you don't see in movies or TV series.
Have you ever heard of Miller City? Yeah, me neither. And apparently, neither did our GPS. We got lost at least 5 times through the same huge Ohioans roads and ended up there. We couldn’t see the end of those roads. All we saw was meadows and corn and cows, meadows and corn and cows. Ohio. We drove around for an hour, looking for a downtown part and a bakery where we could buy some sweets – we needed sugar at that point, after an endless road trip.
We asked a local at a gas station, and he literally laughed at us for asking where the center of the city was: Miller City had no center. The town consisted of the church, the school, the gas station and some houses – something really shocking for us. How was this possible? How do people survive without strolling through streets eating ice cream? Where do the people that live here hang out? WHAT DO THEY DO ALL DAY? This boy probably saw the look on our faces and explained how it all worked there. We listened to him saying how proud he is to be from a small town, he loved living in a town where only 100 people lived, he loved to help his dad at the farm, he loved summer nights swimming in the pond with his friends, jamming on country music and drinking a few beers. Yeah, because in Ohio, everything is possible, and you can drink at 17, because the sheriff is probably your relative. However he said that most of his friends hated that place, hated Ohio and everything related to it, they were all going to try to go away for college.. even the school was too small to have a football team.. who knew that some schools in America don’t have football?
The boy soon had to leave us because he had a beer pong tournament at his house that night.. talk about priorities.
It seems like people have a love/hate relationship with Ohio. I don't know how we ended up in Miller City, but we sure enjoyed amazing landscapes and starry nights, something you don't see that often in a city, and that definitely made us eager to travel more and discover other parts of the Buckeye State.