Where Is This?

Like yesterday's post noted, sometimes we have conceptions about places that unfortunately prevent us from exploring them and enjoying them.  Take California, for instance.  Most people see it as the beach, maybe some mountains and tall trees, maybe a little desert sprinkled in.  They see a superficial culture of surfers, media and film industry types, and aloof people in general.  In reality, the variable geography of California made for extremely diverse First Born cultures living in close proximity to each other, and the state features a colonial history (some good, some not so good) that stretches as far back as the 16th century.  This is all set against a backdrop of just about every sort of ecosystem one can imagine short of pure tropical, but also featuring the very rare one of Chaparral shrub land.  You can read a little about this natural California in one of my oldest posts, here:

http://americanvoyages.blogspot.com/2012/01/remnants-of-natural-california-canyons_10.html

Moving further east, I have found that some of the biggest misconceptions come from those who live in the larger cities and often groan when thinking of having to travel between them.  In particular, most east coasters seem to view everything beyond the Appalachian Mountains as being pretty much beyond the pale, with such people deriding said territory as the Midwest, a title that locals in the great unknown rush to embrace with equal fervor.  Such lands are unbearably flat (or maybe slightly rolling), covered in nothing but cornfields, and full of people more concerned with family values than with international affairs.  You know, some place like this:

Which is funny, because that was taken not ten miles slightly out of Appalachian valley and ridge country.  Yes, that is pure Pennsylvania right there, taken looking north off of the westbound lanes of PA 283 near Elizabethtown.  Pennsylvania is indeed pretty mountainous, but it also has its far share of rural farmland that could easily pass for something as different and distant as Ontario or Kentucky.  The colony itself, like the other North American European ventures, could not survive without resident farmers and ordinary settlers who came to simply live as much as many would come for various idealistic reasons. 

Here we go about 15 miles more down the road and find those mountains, and thus enter into more forested land and familiar scenes (never minding that Harrisburg is hidden behind the trees).

US 22 North; the ridge ahead slopes down towards the Susquehanna River.  This is in the north of Harrisburg.

Of course, even within those mountains one finds valley floors where rich, alluvial soils have long since been cultivated; the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) had done so for centuries in Pennsylvania and upstate New York before European settlers found such places equally agreeable. 

Maryland 495 south, not even 10 miles south of Grantsville.

And sometimes, they cultivated up the more agreeable slopes, too.  I have to admit that I did not expect to see such a scene in extreme western Maryland, which is otherwise pretty vertical and sylvan as a default setting.  This could just as well pass for something in rural southern Michigan or Indiana, and judging from left over campaign signs I saw in the area, the locals probably vote for similar end goals.  Labels can be a tricky thing, though, as can misconceptions.  Why not take a trip down some seemingly boring back roads and be surprised now and then?  Just a few miles down the road was enough to turn that landscape into this:

That was taken on the same day, within a few minutes, and the sky was largely blue just like in the other picture.  It was almost surreal how majestic those blue and misty Allegheny Mountains looked...