Roanoke.

This was the view from my hotel room window. The big white thing is not a blind, it is the back of the bulkhead sign on the front of the hotel.

I was in Roanoke Virginia Wednesday and yesterday for a meeting. It was a refreshing reminder as to what the real America is like. The Roanoke Regional Airport gates are identified as 1 through 8. No need for A1, B152, etc. There is only one concourse and eight gates in the facility.

The buffet breakfast included with my $98 hotel room included sausage patties and some sort of maple flavoured pancake stick things. The lobby was full of guys wearing khaki pants and denim shirts with embroidered logos. They were all speaking into those funny Bluetooth earpieces. I think there was some sort of conference nearby for producers of industrial cleaning chemicals.

I scanned through the local radio stations on my drive to my meeting. A couple of country stations, another promising my salvation. I settled on Planet 101.5 - seemed to be mostly 80's rock. The first ad suggested pick-up truck accessories as the perfect Christmas gifts. Spray-on bed liners and trailer hitches, for example.

After my meeting I dropped into the local Barnes & Noble bookstore, looking for a book on creating presentations (Slide:ology, by Nancy Duarte. Excellent, by the way). There was an entire section dedicated to the available versions of the Holy Bible. A large section.

I think that sometimes buzzing back and forth between Toronto, New York and Chicago it is easy to forget that Plantation Road in Roanoke is more representative of America than Michigan Avenue in Chicago.