Speed Dating America
By: Ashlea Halpern
Tags: Essay, Travel, Personal Growth, Perspective, Culture

THE SKEPTIC IN ME kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. What dark secret was ­Minneapolis hiding? Sure, the mercury can hover around 6 degrees in winter, with the occasional dip below −30. The molten center of the city’s Jucy Lucy hamburger can give you second-degree cheese burns. Wisconsin is half an hour away.

Still, as we drove past prim little cottages and stylish bungalows in handsome residential neighborhoods, we could so easily picture ourselves living here, planting flowers in the front yard, taking pottery classes at a local studio, and spending summer weekends on pontoon boats with our Minnesota Nice friends. Was this, maybe, home?

In the fall of 2014, I quit my job at Bon Appétit magazine to spend a year hopping around Asia and Australia with my partner, Andrew. I’d been tethered to a desk for more than a decade; I wanted to see the world and live out my dream of becoming a full-fledged travel writer. We knocked out 17 countries in our first year abroad and spent an additional eight months living in Bangkok. It was exhilarating and exhausting. When it was time to come home, our initial idea was to pull our belongings out of storage on the East Coast and head to Los Angeles. But the terrifying finality of such a long-distance move, coupled with an intimidating local rental market, inspired a different plan: to road trip around the U.S. until we found a place that checked all the right boxes (culturally rich, ethnically diverse, politically progressive, full of friendly locals, and affordable). In two separate legs totaling 16 months, we’d crisscross America multiple times by car, visiting some 40 states and 229 cities and towns, ticking off a lifetime’s worth of bucket-list diversions along the way (Badlands National Park! Cadillac Ranch! Graceland!). We joked to friends that we were “speed dating America.” Everywhere we went, we asked ourselves: Could we see living here … like, forever?

Andrew and I had met in journalism school in February 2002; I was the features editor at the student newspaper, and he was my pop music critic. Despite his love of nü-metal, we started dating. Like our taste in music, our upbringings were fairly opposite. Born and raised in Buffalo, New York, Andrew had lived most of his life in one house. Before we met, he had flown on a plane exactly once. When we visited his family for Christmas, I slept in his childhood bed. My family, by contrast, traveled often and moved dozens of times, mostly throughout the South. My dad ran his own consulting firm, and my mom, an artist, always thought the next place would be better. Evangelism dominated my public schools in Georgia and North Carolina. The Ten Commandments were painted on the cafeteria wall, and prayers — sometimes called “a moment of silence,” like that fooled anybody — were said before football games and over the intercom during morning announcements. As a weirdo only child with ­Jewish-Wiccan parents, I was a fish out of water. The day after my college graduation, I peeled off to Philadelphia, and later New York, and never looked back. Until now.

EVER A SPREADSHEET FANATIC (I’d run the Strategist section at New York magazine), I started a “USA Rankings” doc that organized each place we visited into one of three categories: the YES List (our top ten), Stranger Things Could Happen (numbers 11 to 30, including surprise entrants like Chattanooga, Tennessee; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Livingston, Montana), and a definitive NOPE pile (everywhere else, with insufferably richie-rich Aspen coming in dead last). Reshuffling the rankings became a daily obsession. Like single dudes forever swiping left, we were fueled by the thrill of the hunt and the fantasy of what might be lurking just around the corner. Besides, when we found the one, we’d know it deep in our bones. That’s how love stories go, right?

Our speed dates lasted as little as one hour (#sorrynotsorry, Dublin, Ohio) and as long as six weeks (Seattle, Atlanta, Minneapolis). Anytime we booked more than three days in a place, we fast-tracked the getting-to-know-you process by plunging ourselves into the daily scrum. We shopped for Bibb lettuce at the local farmers’ market, combed the event listings in the alt weekly, and made ourselves “regulars” at the coffee shops nearest our rentals.