logdog wrote:
I recently accepted a new job that will require relocating from sunny and warm Michigan to sunny and warm Pennsylvania or New York. I will be in charge of a territory roughly defined in this high quality phone art.
I need to live somewhere in that region. Being centrally located and close to an interstate are preferred. It looks like cost of living is cheaper in PA so I am leaning that direction. Plus PA doesnt require a front plate
I know we have several GRMers that are either in these areas or used to live in them before moving some place cold and gray like Florida. Where are the good spots? Places that are car guy friendly. We have horses so I need to find someplace horse friendly as well. What the deal with vehicle inspections (never had to deal with those before). Somebody told me I had to get my trailers inspected too.
What sort of weird local customs do I need to be aware of (like how in MI everybody points at their palm to describe location and the only place anybody visits is "up north"). Can I actually get iced tea without it coming from the soda fountain? Do they generically call diners "Coney Islands"?
I've got several months before I start looking for a new house and I want to spend some time in the area before making the final decision. I just want to identify a few places to start.
Not sure where you are in MI, but keep in mind that (as the yellow interstate lines suggest) much of PA is far more rural than you might think. There are a thousand tiny towns, but the only really Metropolitan areas are Philly and Pittsburgh. Since most people are responding with "oh ___ville is wonderful and they have a nice lake...", I am going to be comically vicious to present the dark side of things. But, remember I'm being flippant and emphatically blunt to prove a point and maybe make you laugh.
Pittsburgh is relatively big, but about the only culture is when the toothless trashy folks wear their clean Steelers jacket and pink stretch pants to go to a fancy dinner at Olive Garden. The roads are terrible, the town is impossible to navigate (and I lived there for years), and regardless of what month it is, it always looks like a grey winter day. When the Grimm Reaper comes and takes a person to Purgatory, its actually Pittsburgh. Its just that you're dead and invisible, which could be a blessing. Come to think of it, if you live there, you will likely feel dead and invisible. Pittsburgh is slowly (very slowly) coming out of a 40-year hell. When the steel industry left, they gave everyone terrible retirements which they use to drink PBR on the front porch of their 1920s shack that hasn't had a new roof or paint since 1935. There are entire sections of town full of once-great victorian townhomes that are complete tenement slums.
Philly has some nice culture if you like pretentious anus-like jerks who think their town is the greatest just because its slightly better than Pittsburgh. The famous Philly Cheesesteaks are worshiped for their mediocrity; a bunch of shredded beef fat cooked perfectly to a flavorless cardboard consistency on a soggy bun with some burned onions and some sauce. They are horrible. The streets are all one-way and they go the opposite way of where you are headed. Despite being a stone's throw from great coastal seafood, the food is awful. Getting a good meal requires that you get a second mortgage and go to a ritzy place that looks like it should be in Manhattan, but its twice as rude and parking is even worse. Plus you have the whole Eagles thing. Ew.
Allentown is a land of sub-poconos mountain glory, except that the mountains were all hacked in half for mining and left to the local teens to decorate with cans of spray paint. The part of the mountains that isn't solidified by layers of enamel simply erodes away making the rivers a flow of sludge and sewage. People in Allentown also must have forgotten that they have the opportunity of driving somewhere else, because if they had, they would realize how E36 M3ty their lives are and never gone back.
I grew up in Carlisle, just west of Harrisburg. It is a great town, but very camo. I hunt and own camo clothing, but a lot of people here ONLY seem to have camo and they wear it EVERYWHERE in their rusty Dodge pickups with a sticker of Calvin praying in front of a cross. Harrisburg is the same thing but with Toyota pickups instead.
Many of the towns up the 81 corridor toward Scranton/Wilkes-Barre are similarly back-woodsy small towns.
PA has some exquisite beauty. Just a lazy trip down a country road reveals some amazing properties and views. If you want some seclusion and don't need a metropolitan area (and can tolerate the rednecks), PA has some of the most spectacular values I've ever seen. Pittsburgh is dirt cheap. The house I bought there in 2011 was a 3/2 on over an acre and it was $51,900. It was a nice partially wooded lot 7 miles from downtown. My favorite counties (for scenic property and value) include Perry, Cameron, Juniata, Potter, Indiana, Elk, Venango, Tioga, Lancaster, Adams. Cumberland county is where Carlisle is and has some incredible properties, but for some reason they are VERY disproportionately high.
New York state can basically be a copy and paste of above, but taxes will be nearly double and every tiny one-horse town has more cops than residents. I don't mind having a lot of police, but I think I wouldn't be happy with my significant tax dollars going to pay for that much redundancy. I'm not sure how taxes are in MI, but PA is not a cheap state for taxes, nor is it particularly cheap for auto insurance (although mine has always been pretty cheap).
The nice thing about upstate NY; your Michigan accent would go mostly un-noticed. They talk very similarly to you.
If you do PA, you will be introduced to the wonder of Sheetz. Its a convenience store with great food. Rutters is a central PA rival of Sheetz and is fantastic, but its an also-ran. While you're here, if you order a coke, you get a coke... as in coca-cola or pepsi. Some places in MI if I recall correctly do the same thing as the south where "coke" is interchangeable with soda.
Central PA (which most typically describes the south-central part of the state; Chambersburg, Lancaster, Harrisburg, up to State College) is full of Amish. Hence the Scrapple. I like it a lot. When you slaughter a pig, you throw the bones and edible organs in a big vat of boiling water. Some (like me) only use the heart and liver, but honestly you can't taste organ meat. You are basically making a big pork broth and also cooking all the little morsels of leftover meat off the bones. Then you take out the bones and throw in a bunch of corn meal and some salt and pepper. It solidifies into a kind of Polenta loaf which you slice and fry. Most people eat it with a little syrup on it, but ketchup is also common.
Because of the Amish influence you'll also see a lot of Chicken and Dumplings, Shoo-fly pie (think of it like a pecan pie minus the pecans and add molasses), and other very Americana type foods like ham and bean soup and stewed tomatoes. Cole slaw around here is almost always the creamy type with mayo and sugar and rarely the vinegar type. Another thing you'll likely encounter is a BBQ sandwich. What most people call Sloppy Joes we here in central PA call beef BBQ. You'll find that hoagies/grinders/subs are all sometimes terms used to describe a long sandwich, but subs is the more common term. Some parts of western PA still say Pop instead of Soda, but either one will get you a carbonated beverage... although "pop" might get you a couple teasing chuckles.
Let's see what else. Full service gas stations are a rarity and gas is pretty expensive these days. It used to be that PA was pretty low and NY was high, now they are about the same. NY is still a couple cents more expensive.
PA is a little odd with its beer and liquor; you can't buy it at convenience stores or grocery stores. There is legislation in the works to privatize liquor sales, but its slow. Beer can be bought at beer distributors. Most bars/pubs also sell 6 and 12 packs. Liquor is strictly at state-operated liquor stores. There are also strange laws that only allow you to carry 6 beers at a time to your car, so don't be surprised if you get two 6-packs at a bar and they ask you to take one at a time out to your car. At beer distributors, they will often carry it out to your trunk for you and drive-through distributors are common for that reason. It is a very loosely-enforced law so don't expect it, just know that it might happen. Beer is pretty cheap. Liquor is on the cheaper end of the spectrum, but not Maryland or Wisconsin cheap. Bars must close at 2am. PA has a loose no-smoking law but each town is widely different. For instance in Carlisle there is a no-smoking law for any bar/restaurant, but bars can get an exemption permit to allow smoking. The state law generally defines no smoking in any public building or within 15 feet of the entry door.
Right turns are allowed on red unless otherwise marked (as in all 50 states). PA also allows left turns on red as long as you are going from a one-way TO a one-way street. Expect drivers to stop on freeway entrance ramps. They might have a half a mile to merge, but they'll go up to the highway and stop sometimes. One little hint: We have hills. Lots of them. Big ones. One thing that tends to frustrate PA drivers is that "flatlanders" can't do hills. It never fails. You can follow a car for 20 miles doing 55, then suddenly on a hill they are going 35. Never fails, the license plate says Michigan or Kansas or Louisiana. We also have a fair number of Buicks with blue-haired wrinkly ladies driving 40 on the highway. Central PA also has a very large number of Amish buggies. Its easy. Just pass when you can. Although the horses are accustomed to it, I like to pass leisurely with a wave. You'll never get a wave back, but I see no reason to flaunt technology to a neighbor who is already potentially disdainful of cars in the first place. I know you have some Amish out there too, but its a bit different here. Lancaster county on a Sunday Morning is like an Amish ant hill that has been kicked. Little black and grey buggies all over the place. Don't buy a book about PA Amish people. I have yet to read one that has any truth in it at all. I know many Amish, but what I learn from them is pointless, because five miles over is a completely different sect that drives cars and uses phones. Then over the mountain is another sect that won't even talk to "fancy" folk.
If you do consider Carlisle, don't do it specifically for the car-friendly part. We do have the largest swap meets on the east coast. The Carlisle shows are massive and awesome, but the town itself isn't huge on car stuff. There are plenty of car-related shows and cruise-ins in the central PA area, but despite being host to the big shows, Carlisle isn't much more of a car town than anywhere else in PA.
Both states teeter on the red/blue line politically; NY often tips red and PA often tips blue, but don't mistake that for an actual political timbre. A PA or NY democrat is more conservative than a CA republican. Although the vote sometimes goes blue, their hearts here are typically red, just like their necks.
Ok... I'm really getting tired. I grew up here and I have traveled a lot, in both NY and PA, so if you have any cultural/geographic/etc questions about it, give me a yell.
I didnt stay the whole night but I did stay long enough to enjoy a couple feature races and a giant hot dog.
