Ask Lemmy

When you pass into Indiana, you're immediately overcome with this opressive sense of forboding and despair. Also the roads immediately turn to shit.

There is a body of water under the bridge, toll collection booths right before or right after the bridge crossing. Also GPS confirms it.

Grew up near the US/Canadian border, there is a line of white rocks that tell you it's the border.

Nope.

The main thing you'll notice is a shit ton of stores for anything that's not legal in one state, or taxed higher in one state.

The rest of the stuff mixes together along state lines and there's no clear divide except for the legal/tax stuff.

Major roads have a "welcome to wherever" sign but minor ones won't. They're always a clear delineation in the pavement, though, because neither state is going to pave one single molecule of distance further than they have to. And they never seem to be able to arrange it so that there isn't a noticeable bump at the junction.

One of my neighboring states also has some kind of pathological aversion to putting complete and legible signs for the names of roads at intersections, too. So the disappearance of all useful street signs is therefore usually also a clue.

You have to pay to leave the state so very obvious leaving!

Well, I live on the Minnesota side of the Minnesota / Wisconsin border and normally I can tell I crossed the border because I have to cross the 4th largest river in the world, the Mississippi river.

Joking aside a big tell used to be frac sand mines. Minnesota cracked down on them much harder much more quickly than Wisconsin so you would see them all over the place in Wisconsin but not in MN. I haven't seen as many of those lately though. Also If I drive too far south I wind up driving out of the Kwik Trip gas station zone and into the vastly inferior Caseys gas station zone in Iowa.

Everytime I cross into Ohio I feel like I'm losing the will to live.

I don’t live near there anymore, but when I did you could legitimately tell when you crossed to NJ because there was trash absolutely everywhere along the sides of highway.

A lot of states in the south will also have a precipitous road quality drop at the state line.

My southern neighbor:

You have to go across the biggest river around.

• Idaho -> Oregon: weed dispensaries
• Idaho -> Nevada: casinos

I’ve lived near the Mason Dixon line for my whole life and you know when you get to Maryland because the roads aren’t covered with potholes and/or construction.

Street signs in Wisconsin and Illinois differ

The roads get better, the drivers get worse, there's jughandles everywhere, they won't let me pump my own gas, and there's liquor stores that aren't owned by the state.

Also I have to cross a river, and pretty much everything gets flatter.

For the other borders, mostly the same. One direction you start seeing more places serving crab, another has no sales tax, one is just boring and depressing, and the other unless you cross at some very specific places is mostly just woods and farms and shit that kind of blend into our own but with better roads.

I travel a lot throughout the US, and sometimes the changes are obvious while other times I can be driving and not entirely sure which state I'm in just from looking around on the highway. As others have said while driving on a major highway a clue can be a huge store full of items like fireworks just across the border from a state they aren't legal in.

The geography and environment can certainly be a big clue. Driving through West Virginia there are tunnels through large mountains, Pennsylvania around the Pittsburgh area has steel bridges, Louisiana has highways raised up from the muck, there are mountains that the highways wind around in North Carolina that give way to pretty flat highways as you go south. Kentucky has long depressing stretches of straight boring road. I've noticed even traffic patterns can say things as Georgia highways always have a higher number of semitrucks than anywhere else for example. Nevada is flat and open but as you go into Utah it gets windy and rocky, and cell signal usually goes out for a bit.

Staying in different states I notice alcohol sales rules are different. In some states you basically don't see any alcohol outside of designated stores for it including no beer at gas stations, in other states you see beer for sale widely but hard liquor only at designated stores, and in other states hard liquor at WalMart is perfectly normal.

I've found on the whole that people are actually nicer than average in Utah. While coffee shops exist I have noticed in offices there is often a lack of a central coffee machine.

Louisiana everyone I deal with from there has a tendency to be much more relaxed than average about showing up exactly on time for things. Louisiana itself also has a cultural divide between the northern part which is more generic US south, and the southern part which has the more creole and tourist heavy atmosphere.

I honestly don't mind Ohio. I know it's an internet meme to hate it, but aside from their obsession with dumping chili on unrelated foods it's decent. Has a strong blue collar streak kind of like Pennsylvania culture.

Texas has a big cowboy influence and they don't let you not know it. The roads tend to big big and wide which is great, except the freeways especially in Dallas can become confusing multilevel nightmares.

California has lots of Spanish signs, lots of first generation Mexicans who bring culture with them. Lots of for example Mexican super markets. Californians have a culture of going FAST on freeways if there isn't gridlock traffic, in some cases going 100mph just barely keeps you up with traffic.

You start seeing sap buckets hanging off utility poles.

One state is across a big river. Marijuana is mostly legal on the other side so the billboards start as you get close to the bridges.

The other state is culturally and geographically identical to the other side of the border. If you look closely you'll see that private liquor stores are allowed, as well as payday lending. That's it.