I loved growing up in upstate NY....autumn especially...beautiful countryside, lots of farms, lots of lakes, orchards, etc...
to this day, I regret moving clear across the country....because NYS will always be my home....
of course now you can't live there easily....its very sad what they have done.
My MIL retired to the Finger Lakes region.
She is surrounded by great Mennonite neighbors.
The winters are nasty though.
I’m in urban Central Florida with a really nice bug-out destination in rural W. Tennessee. But I’m having a lot of trouble with the notion of leaving a state run by Gov. DeSantis for a state that might conceivably turn blue.
I grew up in Utica (Whitesboro), Ithaca (Cayuga Heights), and Syracuse (Fayetteville). I always have fond remembrance of the state as a kid, but my earliest political memories (around 1961) are of the adults complaining about exorbitant taxes and how all the tax dollars flowed to NYC! Yes, 60 years ago!
I had a job offer from Corning, Inc. around 2004 and went to Corning, NY for an interview in late April. The day of the interview I woke up to eight inches of new snow on the ground and realized there was no way I was moving back to the Finger Lakes from sunny California.
But California got SO bad since then that, about four years ago, we bought a house in Idaho only 100 miles south of Canada. At least the Inland Northwest winters are not as harsh as upstate NY.