I left yesterday on a cross-country road trip. I’ll be back in Washington, D.C., in mid-July for a day or two, before looping up to New England and then back down. Part of the challenge of this type of trip is knowing that you can live a place for years without understanding it. I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, and lived there until I went to college in Durham. If you’ve seen the Hunger Games films, Charlotte is literally “The Capital,” by which I mean that’s where “The Capital” was shot. If you drive between South Charlotte where my parents live and “Uptown Charlotte” (what you would call “Downtown”…