After spending four hours in Boalsburg one sunny afternoon last October, I quickly learned that four hours is too much time to spend in Boalsburg.
Lord knows I wasn't there for the fun of it. My friend and roommate was performing in a State College Community Theatre production, and I'm quite sure spending four hours wandering a nondescript Central Pennsylvanian municipality can be found in the dictionary under "supportive."
The village has about 10 stores on its main drag, and most of them were closed. I grabbed dinner in a pizza place that shared its parking lot with a grimy mechanic's shop. And after walking through a graveyard to reach the barn-turned-theater, I found myself watching Very Emotional Nazis talk to Intense Ghosts with perhaps 15 other people, shivering under a hole-riddled afghan and sucking down watery hot chocolate.
Yes, an afternoon in Boalsburg is no charming weekend in Paris. But there's still something magical about getting out of State College for a few hours, even if your destination is no more exotic than Bellefonte or Lemont.
Truth be told, Centre County has a lot to offer.
Bellefonte is home to Cool Beans Coffee & Tea, one of my favorite places in the world. It's the café equivalent of a hug. The eccentric Elvis fan who runs Pizza Mia on Spring Street makes the best Greek salad dressing I have ever had. And for a suburban New Yorker who has to travel about a half-hour -- across state lines to New Jersey! -- to get a Blizzard, the borough's Dairy Queen is basically a dessert Taj Mahal.
East West Crossings on the edge of Lemont is like some perfectly preserved New Age caricature, all mood lighting and Buddhist literature. There are three "tiers" of increasingly expensive teas, and the waitress will even glare at you as you down your hummus and babaganoush. It's just like a city! And if you exit through the back and ford the creek, you can walk back to campus through the Millbrook Marsh Nature Center and cut across the rolling farmland behind Beaver Stadium. That's a walk that makes you take note of just how gorgeous even Happy Valley's outskirts can be.
And in Boalsburg ... there's really nothing to do.
But the essential point remains. Leaving College Avenue behind for a time makes you appreciate the borough's hidden treasures. When you travel, your collected experiences become the fresh filter through which you view home. And for State College, that creates some rose-colored glasses indeed.
Whether you find a new favorite hangout spot or nothing more groundbreaking than a new inside joke, travel helps the soul. Getting to know not just State College but its surroundings makes Penn State really feel like home, not some waiting room on the way to real life.
Euphemisms are a wonderful thing, so I'll say that ... a confluence of circumstances led me to contemplate transferring to the State University of New York at Stony Brook this past spring. I researched their journalism program and got excited about a program that has students travel to Central Asia and trace the ancient Silk Road. And I absolutely loved the idea of being a 90-minute train ride from Manhattan.
But then I realized what a serious step replacing a home was. I took stock of the remarkable people I've met at Penn State and the remarkable opportunities I've been afforded. Who was I kidding? What could possibly live up to Penn State? What college town could hope to compete with State College?
Our entire lives are lived in the comparative. That's why I'm all about nostalgia -- hoarding the experiences that have changed me and the people who I love. How do you know what you have and how much it matters if you can't weigh it against all that has shaped you previously?
The Centre Area Transit Authority (CATA) recently acquired 10 buses from a community in central Florida. According to CATA marketing manager Jacqueline Sheader, the new fleet will bolster the N, V and R lines and will add service to surrounding municipalities like Stormstown.
CATA riders, she said, can expect to see increased service "here and there."
Here and there is how I live my life. Here and there is what I'm all about. I can't wait to try out Stormstown.
