After living for years in both areas, I’m ready to render my verdict. There are three things in which the East Coast is better than the Midwest:
1. Snow. On the East Coast, there actually is some.
2. Apples. Why the Midwesterners can’t grow a damn apple in this tropical climate is a mystery. In upstate NY, we had apple festivals of incredible variety and taste. And here at a farm, the kind of apples they grow – even worms despise them. The first time I took Klara to a local apple farm, she kept asking “where are the apples, mommy?” because what she saw didn’t resemble an apple. Arkansas isn’t the Midwest, though, is it? They have wonderful apples.
3. The spice level of Indian food. Chefs are so terrified of the blandness-loving Midwestern palates that the only way to get any heat into the food is to answer the question of “what spice level out of 10?” with “fifty, please.” Strangely, the only place to find Indian food with some heat around here is the campus cafeteria. I think there’s been a new hire because all of a sudden they are serving curries, and the curries are actually hot.
In everything else, the Midwest is a million, billion, and trillion times better. Arquitecture, affordability, integration, cleanliness, lifestyle, drivers, nature, COVID mitigation – there’s no comparison. Even the sky is more reasonably situated in relation to the landscape. It’s somehow cosier.
Does Florida have apples? Or Wyoming? I’m interested in visiting Wyoming.
Clarissa's Blog 
The apples in Minnesota are fantastic. So is the snow. It’s still the midwest.
To compensate, Indian food spicing is even weaker here.
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The lack of mountains in the Midwest troubles me 🙂
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Can’t grow anything but crabapples in Florida. Instead, we have oranges, grapefruit, bananas, pecans, loquats, avocados, and other things. Just not apples. Tough luck on that one: apples need a real winter.
My great-grandmother’s pink grapefruit tree, though… those were juice-dripping chunks of heaven. And I didn’t even like grapefruits.
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There are apple orchards in WY. If you visit be prepared for winds and it does get cold with snow. You might like that.
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Midwest used to get snow. My mother’s family in Indiana often went to church in winter in a horse-drawn sleigh, and as a child I got rides in the sleigh when we visited at Christmas.
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We are right on the border with the South, so we get a very crazy climate. In winter it’s icy rain, lots of worms, tornadoes, but now snow.
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Worms?
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A new weather pattern? Like the spiders in Australia?
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Strange, there are orchards in and around St. Louis that are amazing. Places like Eckert’s – where you go and pick apples and they are huge and juicy. We also have the most incredible peaches from Calhoon County. Eckerts is in Belleville, Grafton, and Millstadt. You should check them out.
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“The spice level of Indian food …”
Your options in SL are not good for remedying this, BTW.
Try the English-named shop in the state capital, you’ll know which one when you find it.
They even have the Indian MREs (which are mild), but they also have the little premixed spice boxes.
Shan is to me fairly mild, so try National or Eastern instead.
If the idea is to fix the problem at the restaurant, find a “hiker’s spice container” such as the two-ended GSI salt/pepper version, then drill/cut the holes bigger so you can get chile pepper flakes through it.
I keep one loaded with Aleppo chile flakes on one end and piment d’espelette on the other.
If you’re secretly a chile fiend, you may be better off with ordering from Pendery’s Spices in Texas.
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Also, do you want to visit The Real Wyoming?
Try Lander.
It’s a real western town away from the “larger cities” of Casper and Cheyenne, both of which are smaller than any medium-sized Illinois town.
Drive there unless you really like the cost of a rental car out of the airport in Casper.
Lander is cool because it’s not on any major road, and so one does not accidentally arrive in Lander.
Everyone who is there, including you should you choose to visit, made a choice to go there.
Lander briefly had an influx of great numbers of people because of the full eclipse a few years back, but you’ll rarely see even a tenth as many visitors any other time.
Lander is where I used to go for a while to be away from people who expected me to be more available through my mobile phone and computer than I was willing to be.
Not even Verizon works well there, and they’re pretty much it for coverage.
I suppose you could also drop by Sheridan, but my only reason for going there would be to drop by Weatherby’s to have another custom rifle built.
I want them to build my next .270 Winchester rifle now that I can’t get an outfit in Alberta to do a rebarrelling and mod job for me because of the cross-border nonsense.
Unless, of course, Remington or Winchester gets a new life as a Florida corporation. 🙂
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