Thoughts about blogging--you can see where your visitors are--sort of, although people coming in on MSN always come through Redmond, Washington. A few of my readers come from upstate New York, around Syracuse, Rochester, and Utica. After the Hudson River Valley, that area of New York is one of my favorite places. Parts of it are a little flat for my taste, but that's how I felt before I lived in Minnesota, and really knew what flat could be.
Otherwise, New York has it all. Snow, seasons, water, and a central position in American history. In fact, I wrote an MA history thesis on a little-known(but culturally important even today) aspect of US religious history that flowered in this part of New York. And there's the Erie Canal, which, as every sixth-grader knows, was critical to development of New York and the US.
I used to take the Lake Shore Limited from Poughkeepsie to Rochester. In those days the train arrived in Rochester in the middle of the night, and I was always worred about missing the stop and ending up in Buffalo. So I would wake up around Syracuse, and watch the lights from the Thruway and the tiny towns flash by. Those little towns have been there since the American Revolution and before, settled by Massachusetts Yankees who couldn't stomach the enforced rectitude and poor farm land of New England. That probably gave the place an interesting edge.
The only passenger train going across Minnesota is the Empire Builder, named for James J. Hill. That train, unlike James J. himself, is almost always late, sometimes by many hours or even days. The visonaries who built the railroad across upstate New York after the Erie Canal would have been horrified. But that was then....
