J. D. Vance Is a Hillbilly Like I’m a Hillbilly.

Some years ago, my wife and I were in Atlanta, and one day I decided to drive out of the city and go up to the Chattahoochee Mountains for the afternoon. I wanted to see this region because it had been the location for the 1972 movie, ‘Deliverance,’ which was all about some city slickers who get lost in a wilderness zone and then run afoul of the locals who don’t particularly cotton to outsiders coming around, particularly outsiders from urban zones.

I should have known that things in the Appalachians had changed when the first thing I noticed as we drove into the town located on the edge of the Chattahoochee was a very prominent sign advertising the local yoga studio.

We then stopped for a refreshment and toilet break at a mini market whose prices for coffee and ‘gourmet’ edibles put Starbucks to shame.

This refurbishing of rural settlements attracting urban dwellers happy to take a 200-mile roundtrip from their city abodes to wander happily down a little main street and spend some bucks is happening throughout the United States. If you live in New York City, for example, you might consider taking a 60-mile ride up Route 22 to Millerton, which happens to be the hometown of Eddie Collins, maybe the best 2nd-baseman ever to play the game.