USA

This is the running index for Road Trip by Randomizer, a virtual travel series where I use a random U.S. county generator to pick a county or county-equivalent, then wander through it using Google Street View.

This page is not a ranking of which places are “best,” most beautiful, or most important. It is a ranking of encounters: which places grabbed me most through Street View, which scenes lingered, and which virtual roads made me want to keep looking.

A lower score does not mean a place is dull. It may only mean I did not stumble onto its best road yet. The map has a way of keeping secrets.

Scores are subjective and intentionally approximate. Ties are allowed.

There are 3,245 counties and county-equivalent places in the United States, and the randomizer has already begun behaving suspiciously like a storyteller.

First it sent me to Gosper County, Nebraska, a quiet county in the plains. Then it sent me to Yalobusha County, Mississippi, larger, greener, and more Southern in a way that felt both distant and familiar. And now, for the third stop in this series, it has sent me to Coos County, Oregon.

This is the most populous county the randomizer has given me so far. It is also the first coastal county. And visually, it is operating on a different level entirely.

Coos County sits on the southern Oregon coast. Its county seat is Coquille, its largest city is Coos Bay, and its population is somewhere around 64,000, which makes it much larger than either of the first two counties in this little experiment. It was founded in the 1850s, named for the Coos people, and stretches from Pacific beaches and bays into forests, river valleys, and old interior roads.

That last part is what surprised me most.

I expected the coast to be beautiful. Oregon has a reputation for that. But I did not expect the county to feel so geographically compressed, as though several different movie locations had been folded into one map square. One minute, I was looking at fog, cliffs, beach grass, and an old car by the water. A little later, I was standing virtually on a broad beach beside sea stacks and a happy orange dog. Then I was inland, following a narrow road through green forest, sunlight, moss, boulders, flowers, and a small creek that looked suspiciously prepared to transport a hobbit.