The middle of nowhere, a changing definition

From the August 2006 issue of enRoute magazine:

Middle of Nowhere isn’t a physical location. Not anymore. In this era, when we have Google Mapped every corner of the earth (and some other planets), almost no place is so remote it’s truly nowhere.

No, we think the Middle of Nowhere is a state of mind. It’s the satisfied pleasure-tinged-with-insider’s-delight that you feel when you discover something pretty great in a place where you didn’t know it thrived. So that when you experience this thing, whether it’s in the middle of a major city or a cornfield, you think, This? Is here? I had no idea!

I encountered this sensation in Minneapolis last week with the Mill City Museum, a place I didn’t know existed in a location I was intimately familiar with. It happens all the time in NYC too…there’s always some great little spot you haven’t discovered in Central Park, a shop in Chinatown selling who knows what, or even a place just around the corner from the apartment that you’ve lived in for three years that, unbeknownst to you, has served fantastic pot stickers all this time. (via moon river)

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