My most recent new state visited was Wisconsin back in 2014. I was in MN (specifically southeast side of the twin cities) for several days for a work trip. My colleague and I were sharing a rental car, and we figured why not go across the state line just for funsies. We wound up driving to Prescott WI, stopped for some pictures right across the bridge, visited a liquor store on the edge of town, and returned to our hotel in MN.

This was a very small sample size (about half an hour in total), so it’s hard to give a positive or negative recommendation based off of it.

I will note for the record that nearly 6 million people live in WI. It’s implausible that they could all be wrong, so clearly there must be a decent amount of upside to the place. I hear UW Madison is an amazing university. They have MLB, NBA, and NFL teams. They like drinking. They have plenty of museums and touristy shit and natural scenery. If you went there for a week and didn’t try to eat all your meals from the nearest gas station, I’m sure you’d have a decent time.

Not really a state, but I just went to DC back in like June. I highly recommend going there. If you’re going to go then go for a full week minimum.

Get a hotel across the street or right next to a subway station. So you can walk out the front door and go right onto the subway and that will take you right down to the national mall. It will save you so much time. It will also save you a lot of money doing that.

If you’re going to go to the air space Museum on the national Mall, whatever your ticket says, show up five minutes later. Not earlier , show up later. So for example, if your ticket says 11 AM, then show up at 11:05 or possibly even 11:08. You will more or less just walk right through the doors. There might be some line there, but you won’t be outside very long. There’s absolutely zero reason to show up early. You will only waste your time by showing up early.

The same goes for the natural history museum, and pretty much any other museum there. Not sure about the Holocaust Museum. I think on that we showed up maybe one minute early, but we were inside pretty fast.

There are two air and space museums one on the national Mall one of the west of DC. The one on the national mall has the smaller historical effects. The one to the west of DC has the large planes such as space shuttle, and the SR 71 Blackbird.

Figure out where your legislator office is at. Both the Senate and the house. Because if you go to their private office, they will give you a pass intothe capital building to see the house and the Senate. Without those passes, you can get into the visitor center of the capital but you won’t get to the house or Senate side. The pass is free.

You can take a tour of the capital I don’t remember if that cost money or not but I do know you have to give a lot of advance notice to get those full tours.

Go see the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam memorial and the memorial for the Korean war. Do it during the day but you need to see it at night All three of them at night. When I say night I mean 10 pm or 10:30 or even 11pm. It is absolutely amazing how they have that place lit up. To walk the Korean war veterans memorial at night is something you will not forget. That whole area is , I’m not even sure what the word is, Amazing is the only word I can think of, but I know there’s a better word.

The Hamilton has some excellent food. You might wanna place reservations to get in. We got lucky and only had a couple of minute wait.

On the capital grounds there is a large golf cart that will take you from one side of the grounds to the other. It’s free. You just go out front of the visitor center and there are people standing out there by a white tent that can call one for you. Saves you a lot of walking and those grounds are huge.

Speaking of large everything in that city is large, so bring some comfortable shoes for walking you’re gonna need them.

Go to the World War I memorial out there not a lot of people go there. But it is definitely something you should see.

Utah was a recent new one for me.

Salt Lake City was unlike any other place I’ve been to. The train system is super cool for getting around. The highway system is well planned and isn’t nearly as chaotic as other similarly sized cities. There are some interesting rules especially around alcohol. In a restaurant you can’t just order a beer and not eat. You have to have food in front of you at all times no matter what. Overall kind people there in my experience but you can sense some friction between mormons and non. If you go hit up Ruth’s diner for breakfast

Passing through the western border with Nevada there’s a tiny town called Wendover. That border also changes the time zone so things get weird there. If you want to live Fallout New Vegas in real life that’s the place to check out.

The Nevada side has a few casinos and marijuana dispensaries. The Utah side has most of the homes and an old WWII airfield used to train the atomic bomb aircrews. They also have the salt flats where land speed records have been set. You can literally see the curvature of the earth from the nearby mountains.

I think Salt Lake City is worth a visit with enough stuff to do and the beautiful landscape. I probably wouldn’t want to live there though

Ohio.

Fuck no. Three people got shot across the street from where I was at - I didn’t stick around long enough to find out if any of them lived through that ordeal or not.

Sorry if that’s depressing - it’s life in America, sadly. The opioid epidemic + pandemic seems to have hit that state pretty hard too.

Edit: I am sure that not all areas in that state are that way - the major cities have some issues though, especially for someone who doesn’t know the area, like where it’s safe to go or not go.

Colorado. Stayed at one of the small inns in Estes Park along the Fall River. I 100% recommend it. They roll up the sidewalks at 8:00, but whatever.

Hmmm, I think that’s gotta be Pennsylvania.

Visited my wife’s family. They’re mostly in and around Pittsburgh, so that’s really the only section I saw more than the side of roads.

But I loved it. I’m not a city boy at all, to the point I outright hate most of the ones I’ve been to for any length of time. Pittsburg is a rare exception. If the rest of the state is like that city, it’s fine by me!

You know how you enter most cities and the air starts to kind of abrade your sense of smell, even if it isn’t exactly bad smelling? Pittsburgh mostly smelled nice, even by the river. River + city normally = stink in my experience. Downtown is bloody gorgeous. The typical touristy spots (like the cathedral of learning) were all fairly unbusy since the visit was around Christmas, but because of the time of year, there was a lot of traffic by car and by foot, but the people were still way nicer than I’m used to in a city.

Like, compared to Baltimore, where I’ve visited a friend a few times, there was just a different vibe on the street with people. And it was miles better than New York where damn near everyone is a dick in my experience. Atlanta is fairly close in terms of people being friendly and helpful to an outsider, so is Charlotte, but neither felt as genuinely welcoming.

Part of that could be ascribed to Pittsburgh just being nicer to southerners, I guess, but if that’s the case, it’s still better on my end of things. But even when I wasn’t talking and being obviously southern, the reactions were just nicer. I hobble on a cane, and was doing so for the other cities I’ve mentioned. Pittsburg was the one city where nobody that bumped into me was a dick about it, and it was by far the place where more people that did so stopped, apologized, and offered help.

Like, that’s such a rare thing. In New York, it was, at best, someone stopping, seeing I wasn’t on the ground and moving on. Atlanta was worse than that in some ways, but wasn’t as crowded either, so it’s hard to judge. The number of people that would bump into me I Atlanta, but tell me to watch where I was going was higher than new York, even though there were also more that stopped to be sure I was okay.

I dunno, I love the South, and I can’t see leaving, even if I had infinite wealth. I’d rather just remodel my house and stay here. But if I had to move, and it had to be a city, it’s Pittsburgh.

Montana.

Went for a funeral, wasn’t there long enough to see much of anything, no touristy stuff at all. View from the hotel was nice, minus the highway cutting through the foreground.

Can’t give a fair recommendation, given how little I saw.

Flew into Boston (Massachusetts) not too long ago. It was a business trip with a tight schedule, so I didn’t get to do any tourist-y stuff, but it was a pleasant place to visit; it definitely made a good first impression. It was in February, and on my second-to-last day there, there was a big snow storm. The efficiency at which they dealt with the snow and cleared the roads/sidewalks was quite impressive.