Home, Travel, and Safety

Filed in archive Travel News on August 2, 2007

Having spent a majority of my youth and college days in the Twin Cities, it was especially shocking to watch the events of the past day unfold. To have such scenes of carnage occur on landscape so familiar was unsettling, even though I was 10 miles away, watching, like most of the rest of the world, on a TV screen. I have used the 35W Mississippi often over the years, though not recently. I always appreciated the views of the mississippi river and downtown Minneapolis as I crossed.

Therefore, the 35W bridge collapse hit pretty close to home (I'm sure I speak for all Minneapolis/St. Paul residents, many of whom share my familiarity with the bridge and its surroundings). Hometowns, even if they are cities of more than a million, are places that people, at least most people, consider to be reasonably safe. A bridge might be washed away in Bangladesh or Timbuktu, but never in Dallas or Seattle or Minneapolis.

To put this in the context of travel, I guess I would just have to say that safety is relative. Unless a traveler is dropping into a war zone, most of the perceived danger in a foreign place probably springs from a discomfort with the unknown rather than actually danger. What office worker, headed home from downtown Minneapolis yesterday afternoon, would have sensed danger as they crossed above the Mississippi River?

Despite the previous paragraph, this post isn't really very "travel-related." Thanks for letting me indulge in this little editorial. Others are providing more eloquent coverage of events in Minneapolis here, here, and some videos here.