Arbitrary Numbers

Over the weekend, I had an opportunity to travel to Peoria with the cross country team to run in a major invite. By simply traveling through part of the relatively unpopulated middle section of Illinois, I experienced a very small amount of American history, as the historian Studs Terkel chronicled in his work we read for AIS. One of my teammates commented on our hotel, saying that "this is probably where people from around here take vacations." It was very average, well-maintained but by far much less than anyone on the team would experience on an average vacation. The Stony Creek Inn was occupied by several teams, plus a couple of families there for a brief weekend vacation. It didn't appear to me that these were the average Americans who made history everyday, but my sense of a vacation is really skewed, based on what the small-towners considered a weekend getaway. Although my teammates and I only stayed there a bit, there were a lot of comments about how none of us could imagine living in such an "isolated" area. Although it would be a different experience, I believe it would be a valuable chance to live in a much smaller community, even for a day or two. The north shore environment has shaped me in many ways, but I think I'd only truly appreciate it if I lived in this different world for a week.