Thoughts from the trip so far.

My route yesterday took me through a bit of Appalachia and a clearly impoverished part. I saw multiple classic small town main streets where there were few if any stores still in business (it was hard to tell for several.) I passed two stores that had Heilig Meyers signs; a furniture store chain that collapsed fifteen years ago. One had some sort of business while the other had been boarded-up for years.