We Always Hear about the beautiful, What About the Ugly?

[Andy A]

The wonderful, exotic and beautiflul cities we have been to, such as Madrid, Paris and London but you never hear about the ones that were the worst. Just curious if others have their favorite worst city ever visited. Mine is: Tripoli, Libya. You could smell it from three miles away.

 

[MrMentalFitness]

I've been to a lotta cities and towns around this great big world of ours that would qualify to some people as sucking (places in the Philippines, Mexico, China, the Middle East, etc.), but for some reason the ability to get hold of copious quantities of beer just rendered the various funky smells and gnarly infrastructure deficiencies into delightfully adventurous regional charm.

One often longs for the days of staggering into fly-infested back rooms to pee in a hole in the dirt floor next to some strange woman squatting to take care of her daily constitutional.

Nothing like travel to expand one's world view.

 

[beachmouse]

Small town division: Cairo, Illinois. It's pretty much a town that's already seen its zombie apocalypse, complete with creepy-arse floodwall system where you're always expecting the floodgate to come down any minute and block your car and your escape from the lone road that goes northward out of town.

 

[ASH]

Philadelphia has great architecture, but I've never seen so much litter everywhere as I did there.

 

[Matt J]

Perry, Florida. It's a strip of old Florida road that time forgot.

 

[scooterbug44]

Perry, Florida. It's a strip of old Florida road that time forgot.

Is that the place that smelled so bad I was gagging?

Gary, Indiana and Naples, Italy are my 2 worst.

I tend to err on the side of nature and beauty when traveling, but the unplanned overnight in the (closed) Naples train station w/ the stray dogs and homeless was quite the urban experience.

Gary a cop saw me and just told me how to get back to the interstate w/o me saying a word.

 

[Andy A]

Yep. Naples was second on my list and also qualifies for the worst pizza I've ever had in my life.

 

[beachFool]

Perry, Florida. It's a strip of old Florida road that time forgot.

Perry Florida is the French Riveira compared to Keaton Beach.

The place is a hell-hole.

 

[beachmouse]

US 19 in general has that freaky apocalypse feel to it between Tallahassee and about Chiefland- so many old school 'motor courts' still standing and crumbling even though they'd been abandoned long ago when the big car traffic shifted to I-75. The thing with Perry isn't just that it's an ugly small town; the people who live there have a reputation for ugly personalities as well.

We'd never leave the interstate when we drove through Gary, but the smell of that town always managed to permeate the entire car.

 

[kathydwells]

US 19 in general has that freaky apocalypse feel to it between Tallahassee and about Chiefland- so many old school 'motor courts' still standing and crumbling even though they'd been abandoned long ago when the big car traffic shifted to I-75. The thing with Perry isn't just that it's an ugly small town; the people who live there have a reputation for ugly personalities as well.

We'd never leave the interstate when we drove through Gary, but the smell of that town always managed to permeate the entire car.

And the really sad thing is that my parents have a home for sale in between Perry and Chiefland, in Old Town. Been on the market a year now and I have a feeling it is going to be on the market for a long time to come. Not too many folks looking to move to that part of Florida!