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People who are wealthy enough or high-powered enough to travel a lot get jaded. But I rarely go anyplace more exotic than Rising Sun, so a trip to another part of the country still feels special. When we flew to Charleston, S.C., for the annual conference of The Alliance of Area Business Publications, I kept track and found that there’s still a lot to like about traveling.

I like to be surrounded by history. Compared with the Eastern Seaboard, Iowa feels as if it were settled a couple of weeks ago. Here’s what you might find on a walk through Charleston: a sign reminding passers-by that a building was struck by Union cannon fire while the city lay under siege during most of the Civil War; cobblestone streets; a monument to Gen. P.T. Beauregard, who kept the Yankees at bay; the grave of Vice President John C. Calhoun; and the tombstones of folks who never made the history books, but whose names are still legible a couple of centuries after their funerals, along with poignant bits of poetry. Don’t trust someone else to come up with something catchy for your marker. Start jotting down ideas today.

I like unusual modes of transportation. The tourist section of Charleston features three-wheeled pedicabs, powered by young men pumping the pedals. Fortunately for these guys, the area is flat. Unfortunately, tourists don’t appear to be getting any slimmer.

I like to discover outrageous information that makes my humdrum life seem like a reasonable choice. I was walking in a neighborhood full of old buildings, leafy courtyards and intriguing alleyways when I happened across a woman watering flowers. We talked for a minute about the places for sale on that street, several of which were listed by Sotheby’s International Realty. She claimed that residences are selling for a million dollars, up from around $300,000 just a few years ago.

Downtown Charleston is an interesting place with lots of nice restaurants. But a million bucks seems like a steep price for living in a building with century-old plumbing, limited views and crowds of tourists stumbling around, peering through every iron gate we can find.

I like it when people far away have heard of Iowa and appear to have some interest in the topic. On this trip, of course, they automatically acted and sounded sympathetic because of all the flood news. They seemed disappointed when I didn’t have any personal suffering to describe. Honesty has its flaws.

I like the way women dress in the summer in the South. They do not believe in trapping heat.

I like bridges, and they have a beauty in Charleston. The Cooper River Bridge features a pair of diamond-shaped supports towering over the flat countryside and draped with webs of cables. Skyscrapers are cool, but a big, elaborate bridge is like a grade-schooler’s boast made real. You can see a picture of this one at www.cooperriverbridge.org.

I still like to look out the window of an airplane. Serious grown-ups are supposed to work feverishly on laptop computers, or at least tackle a Sudoku puzzle. American teenagers are already so bored with air travel that they immediately fall asleep or get lost in electronic devices. But I gape at the landscape and the towns and wonder what’s going on down there right at that moment.

Mostly, what’s going on is ordinary people getting lost in electronic devices, but it’s always fun to imagine that there’s more.

I really like bizarre coincidences. I was riding on the shuttle from the airport to downtown, and a fellow passenger told the driver he would need a return ride first thing Sunday morning. That was the same schedule we were on, so I asked him if he was attending the AABP conference. He said he was.

We wondered why we were headed for separate hotels, went on for a little bit, and then finally cracked the mystery. He was a member of the AABP, all right – the American Association of Bovine Practitioners.

If the speakers had gotten mixed up, today I might know a little more about artificial insemination.

But what I liked most of all was when I approached the Corky’s restaurant cashier in the Memphis International Airport and she greeted me with, “Hey, baby.”

You don’t hear that enough up North.