Travel Tips

All that is gleaming and glorious about Niagara Falls comes horribly crashing down on the US side. It's almost as if the Niagara River were sucking the life from the US side, cleaning it and dumping it into the streets of the Canadian city in the form of tacky American pop culture and chain restaurants. The only reason to come to the US side is to park to walk across the bridge or if you are, for some reason, restricted from entering Canada (you do need a passport to return now) and still want to see the falls. Niagara Falls' problems can be traced back to the Love Canal days and the stigma created by the collapse of the surrounding industry because of a new, more environmentally-conscious American population. Despite its beauty, the Niagara River was once one of the most polluted rivers in North America. Significant and successful efforts have been made by both the US and Canada to clean up the river, but the damage has been done to its reputation. The resulting exodus of industry from the town and a heavy dose of white flight left the neighborhoods surrounding the central part of the city, close to the falls, a dangerous wasteland of abandoned and dilapidated homes with only a few brave trinket shops and poorly-placed hotels resulting in many armed robberies of lost tourists wandering into these awful neighborhoods just a few blocks from their hotels. Even the parking garage that American visitors are corralled into is outright scary, and I was certain that my car would have been broken into had I remained there into the evening.

Although California's Central and San Joaquin Valleys are generally considered the antithesis of its nature, Stockton seems to be the ultimate failure in the lifestyle of the Golden State. Its redeeming quality is its relative proximity to the Bay Area, quite a world away with a 2-hour drive to its edge at Pleasanton, but a million miles in feeling. Despite light traffic for California standards, there are several freeways here, and it's my theory that this is to prevent the depression of the residents by giving them something to do in the city without them actually having to look at it, as most of these freeways are elevated.
When I visited Stockton, I could see some genuine effort had been made to attempt to turn it into a more pleasant place with parks and signs of mixed-use redevelopment in the Downtown area. This part of town, despite being an obviously bad area with little other than government offices, bars and seedy apartments, is actually better and more attractive than the neighborhoods that surround the Downtown area. Then a drunk woman walking in front of my car at a stoplight, for no reason at all, yelled at me.

Take the stifling humidity and insect issues of a farming region, the intolerable heat of the lower Sonoran Desert, the crime and social issues plaguing border towns, the crime and social issues plaguing military towns, and you still have several more negatives to add to El Centro. Why the megalopolis of Los Angeles and San Diego hasn't resorted to using this area as a toxic waste dump relies solely in the importance of the Imperial Valley to the produce industry. Much of the fresh vegetables in the Southwest come from here. However, when the Colorado River dries up or when people move over to a more organic form of vegetable production, whichever comes first, this area will surely meet its doom and return back to the lifeless, unsympathetic desert that it should actually be.

Regarded as the crystal meth capital of the nation, the city serves as a dark leech on the back of its wealthy neighbor, Palm Springs. Everyone I've encountered in Indio and Coachella was either high or seemed utterly depressed and hopeless.
I've spent much more time in Indio than I would have ever cared to due to three non-consecutive attendances to the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival held annually at the climatically-inept end of April.

Despite its enormous size, there's not much that's great about the towns of Mohave County. Lake Havasu City may interest you if you're under 25 or over 65, but you're otherwise fairly screwed except for the 5 minutes or so entertainment that the London Bridge offers. But Bullhead is absolutely the worst. If the second-highest recorded temperature ever in the country were not enough to keep you away, the mass homeless population and crime from the casinos across the river should be. There is absolutely no reason to come to Bullhead unless you're driving to Laughlin or avoiding the Hoover Dam on the way to Vegas (although the bypass itself doesn't really pass through Bullhead), and there is a good reason why there are very few hotels here to compliment its sister city across the river in Nevada. Laughlin actually gleams and glitters a little bit more because Bullhead City is just that bad.

Ogden is a scary and unsettling place. It is everything that is unattractive about being in the fundamentalist state of Utah, plus poverty and property crime. Its surrounding mountain landscape and beautiful university campus are certainly redeeming qualities, but, outside of this, it reverts to being yet another city that has unfortunately failed to recover from the downfall of the railroad industry, yet still has a significant population.

Take the desert, subtract any signs of plant or animal life, flatten it, add a layer of short, ugly grass, stifling humidity and you will still have to add the annoying contingent of W-loving cowboy wanna-bes that reside here to get the Permian Basin. Although this could easily just as well describe its sister city, Midland, at least that city has a nice skyline of nearly-abandoned office buildings left over from the 1980's oil boom to offer some aesthetic attractiveness.

Wyoming, outside of the Yellowstone region, is just a terrible place. It's really sad when a dull, ugly town like Cheyenne, desperately hugging your state's edge, as if trying itself to escape, is its capital. But Wyoming gets much worse as you venture into its interior and both Cheyenne and the slightly more attractive Laramie start to look pretty good.
Green River is just about as bad as it gets. It is a glimpse into the impending post-industrialist apocalypse, with a few truck stops. It will most likely be declared as one huge Superfund site within the next 100 years. The town is almost solely reliant on a huge mine and, as the pit gets bigger, the town seems to be losing its grip on the cliffs above on which it's built. The larger Rock Springs to the east is also a terrible place, but it at least has a good brewpub and a reasonable amount of shopping. And Evanston, to the west, has found some success as a stop for Utahans seeking escape from fascist alcohol restrictions. But Green River has nothing to offer.
Wyoming has always been the frontier and is one of the few states to remain lightly populated and lacking significant exploitation by the tourism corporations.