Introducing AlwaysDetour.com

For the last few months I’ve been quietly building a new website, AlwaysDetour.com, dedicated entirely to travel. There’s plenty of older travel stuff scattered around here on OMB, but from here on out, everywhere Vi and I go gets documented over there. I’m doing it for two reasons:

1. It’s nice to have one place to keep our favorite photos and notes, so we actually remember everywhere we’ve been and everything we saw.
2. I’m hoping it helps and inspires other people, whether they turn it up in a search while planning their own trip, or I just hand someone a link when a place comes up in conversation.

I keep saying a Trip or a Place, and that’s on purpose. I built the site around those two ideas, because that’s honestly how travel works:

• We plan a Trip somewhere. A vacation in France, say, or a driving loop across the country.
• Along the way we stop at Places. The Louvre, the Grand Canyon, or a gas station with the world’s largest something out front.

If you’d like an email whenever we add somewhere new, there’s a subscribe box at the bottom of the site. And if you’re just hunting for ideas, open the Map, zoom into wherever you’re headed, and see whether we’ve flagged anything nearby worth the detour.

A Few Places to Start

I’ve traveled a lot more than what’s on the site so far, but it’s filling up fast. As I write this we’ve already logged 6 road trips and 66 places across 9 states. A few of my favorites so far:

• The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, right on the shore of Lake Erie. Part archive, part shrine, part playground; we gave it the better part of a day and could have stayed longer.
• The Parthenon in Nashville: a full-scale replica of the original, columns and all, built for Tennessee’s 1897 centennial and never taken down. “Athens of the South,” indeed.
• The National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky, home to a collection worth more than our house, plus the infamous 2014 sinkhole that swallowed part of it. One of the wrecked cars is still on display, exactly as they pulled it out.
• The Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory, where you can’t miss the giant bat leaning on the building out front, then watch the real ones get shaped on the factory floor.
• Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Yes, we went. Yes, it’s a genuinely good time.

And that’s the short list. Every one of those started as a detour off the main route, which is sort of the whole point. I’ll keep adding them constantly, every new trip plus backfilling the older ones that still hold up. Come find your next detour at AlwaysDetour.com.