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The Weekend After in PA    [ Rants ]

Drove up to Pennsylvania this weekend after Thanksgiving to visit Jessica's family up there - her mom and her dad are from the same small town in the middle of Pennsylvania.   It's a bit quieter than Northern Virginia, but there's other differences too.

I've never lived in a small town.   I grew up in the 'burbs of Michigan (outside of Grand Rapids), Arizona (outside of Phoenix) and Northern Virginia (outside of DC).   I've never spent much time in a small town before, so John Cougar Mellencamp's song certainly doesn't apply to me.

On our last trip to middle-of-the-state Pennsylvania, Jessica and I went to go see a movie.   We had to walk in through a crowd of people exiting from the last showing, and for some reason, it seemed odd.   We both looked around and realized that they was no variation in skin tone -- no Asians, no Latinos, no African-Americans, no Middle Easterners or Indians.   Having grown up in NoVA and attended George Mason University, where the student union could be mistaken for the entrance hall of the UN, this was a little creepy.   If you travel to Iceland, for example, you expect everyone to look like they haven't seen the sun in six months.   I didn't expect it in rural Pennsylvania, at least not to that degree.

So it's a lot more ethnically homogeneous, or in layman's terms, there's a lot of white folks there.   And it's definitely a working-class state.   Lots of factories and plants and mills, not nearly as many gleaming glass towers of commerce and finance and shopping that mark a service-sector economy.

On the drive up through Route 11 and Route 15 north in PA, there's more than a few "High DUI Crash Zone" and "Buckle Up - Next Million Miles" and "Insurance Fraud - Think Before You Act" signs and billboards.   You don't see that in Virginia.   Not because there aren't drunk drivers or people who don't follow seat belt laws or that the citizens of the Commonwealth are so virtuous that, to a single one, they would never commit insurance fraud, but that one doesn't see public or private funds contributing to such large placards on the side of the road.

Don't get me wrong - I enjoy visiting Pennsylvania, and it's quite nice to stay somewhere quieter and more relaxed for a weekend.   But the attitudes are different, and not just in a "wow, what a nice little town" way.   Everyone knows their neighbors, but everyone knows their neighbors - health problems, real-estate deals, marital issues, and how their kids are doing.   Very different from the 'burbs where you could easily go half a year without saying anything to the folks who live in the townhome smack dab next to yours.

We ate waaay too much on Saturday, sat around and talked, drove out to the local bottling company to pick up some birch beer and root beer, grabbed some subs from a local joint downtown, and went back to eat and talk and read and play cards.   It snowed on Sunday morning and we woke up, read for a little, had some breakfast and got moving for the four-hour drive back home.