cait: when i was visiting family recently i realized that one of the biggest differences between Texas and MA is that MA has sooo many towns and cities. i drive through like 4 towns in 20 minutes just on my way to work. in Texas you can drive for two hours and still be in San Antonio somehow

when i was visiting family recently i realized that one of the biggest differences between Texas and MA is that MA has sooo many towns and cities. i drive through like 4 towns in 20 minutes just on my way to work. in Texas you can drive for two hours and still be in San Antonio somehow

okay this reminds me of one of my favorite jokes. [Texas rancher] I can step out of my house, get in my pickup, drive for an hour, and still not have left my land [Oklahoma farmer] I had a truck like that too

Tuscaloosa is 25 minutes from Oklahoma City. By phone. (Old one.)

my wife grew up in Connecticut and she talked about her town being "rural" and her home being a farmhouse, and i thought that meant Texas-style rural. no, you could throw a rock from her yard and hit the neighbor quite easily. just town after town after town. but no pizza delivery?

friend of mine moved to rural Mississippi and asked someone if there was a Home Depot around. "Yep! There's one in Memphis!" which was 3 hours away.

New England has so many towns because all the early settlers hated basically everyone else, so their solution to any disagreement was “fuck you, I’ll make my own town then”. For efficiency, they only moved far enough away to glare back at the last guys (and have to clear minimal trees.)

Basically this, but angry Puritans and Congregationalists instead of robots.

My favorite example is that in New Hampshire, there's a Derry *and* a Londonderry, right next to each other.

my ex-wife almost got a job in Lubbock, where you have to drive 2 hours just to get to the interstate where you can then start going somewhere else

My favorite in MA is entering the same town multiple times while on the same road, drives my Midwest wife batty 🙃

Beat me to it. Oh, you think you're in Waltham, only for 2 minutes.

Or like Wayland where I lived as a kid which has a special extra town (Cochituate) hiding inside like a matryoshka doll

Which I still can't say correctly after living here 25 years

Heh, that's "officially" the town I work in for the last 2 years even though I *haven't* lived there in 25 years

i always pronounced it coh-CHICH-yoo-aht, where the "ch" is a soft one like in "such"

East Texas is a bit more like MA, but scaled way down. Like you can drive for 3 hrs and pass through little rural farming communities that are basically a stop sign, a Dairy Queen, and a post office. Central Texas was shaped by empresario grants, with little dense cultural enclaves far apart.

Here are the 1825-1833 empresario grants, corresponding to early settlements that became Austin, San Antonio, Houston, etc. In the Hill Country, the German settlers rebuffed claims by American immigrants, so there wasn't the plantation sprawl of E Texas.

i grew up in connecticut and my californian friends always roast me (deserved lol) when i'm like hey i'm visiting LA maybe i can drive by SF to visit more of you and they're all like lmao drive a plane

Leaving Massachusetts was such an eye-opening experience for me. What do you mean, "unincorporated county land?" How is it possible to not be somewhere?

I have absolutely driven through Boston for two hours but for different reasons 🙃

DARRR YOU EASTERNERS ARE ALL THE SAME I’M ORIGINALLY FROM NEW YORK BUT I CURRENTLY LIVE IN NEW YORK SO I GUESS I’M JUST AN ADOPTED NY’ER

Meanwhile Philly people will go down to the mat over whether some place 15 minutes from center city is Philly or not, out west that’d still be “down town.”

I grew up in semi-rural (now very suburban) PA near the MD/DE border and, depending on the route, going to the grocery store could involve crossing two state lines the scale of Texas is still hard to contemplate to me

when I drive to Austin, the first 75 minutes is all Houston. I go 70 miles up 45 and out 290 before seeing a town named Waller

tangentially related I have relatives who lived in Belchertown MA. Great town name.

You can do the same thing in Manhattan!

::rimshot::

In the 6 stoplights between me and Philadelphia, you pass through like 5 ‘boroughs’. It’s like they made towns out of ‘some dudes farmland’.

Texas compounds this by always building OUT instead of UP. If you are a small town on the edge of a big city and do not have your incorporation paperwork done properly, the big city WILL come and "eminent domain" your ass into oblivion

Massachusetts, it’s the English America. Don’t have a town further away than a reasonable horse ride from another.

I drove north of Lubbock and was somehow in San Antonio

Driving from Fort Worth to Galveston, half the trip is through Houston.

No “county land” in MA.

This is one of the things I like best about the east coast. I grew up in eastern WA, where you had to drive 6 hours to get to a city in the same state. Drive 6 hours from where I live in MD and you’ve gone through 6 states and hit up DC AND NYC.

I learned from visiting Texas only two times to never trust the estimation "just down the road"

Southern Indiana is like that too, so many little towns. One of the weird things when I moved to WA was how you'd get out of town and have nothing for the next 100 miles

Partly that's because MA has been settled by Europeans for longer than Texas, and partly it's because if you moved far enough away from a town that you couldn't reasonably get to church on Sunday, you built a new town with a new church, because not going to church on Sunday was unthinkable.

texas builds shit too far apart imo. gotta drive 20 miles to take a piss

Florida is like Texas in that. Not as sparse I’ll bet. Another difference I notice: places that developed before the highway system have lots of locally owned businesses, but Florida is all nat’l and internat’l chains. Is Texas like that?

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