Thread #2867529
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2026 is a great year to start exploring Appalachia
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>>2867529
Nope
West Virginians do not like outsiders snooping around their towns and their hollows. So can we stop pretending like it is a good place to visit? They are grumpy, fat, lazy and sour-faced. They make very little effort to provide appealing goods & services to visitors. Nearly all of the accessible land near towns is private property, so you have to go into the remote regions to find the open tracts of National Forest land. Yes, the forest is beautiful, but being so isolated from humanity, and dealing with all the indifference (at best) or passive-aggressive hostility every time you go to town, that all leaves you feeling very unhappy even when the sun is shining and the birds are singing.
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>>2867564
some do some don't, I think it depends on your attitude, they are certainly hostile to outsiders, but if you show genuine, repeated interest in their land you can get exceptions to the private property rule and they will show you around
>They make very little effort to provide appealing goods & services to visitors
my burgeoning art collection says otherwise
appalachians are master of painting, metalwork, woodwork, glass blowing, and other fine arts, but really I think the lathed wood bowls stand out the most - if I had a lot more money I'd collect paintings you can get very, very nice original paintings for a few hundred dollars in smaller towns, whereas more "established" places like Asheville or Brevard you would have to pay thousands for nice paintings.
> that all leaves you feeling very unhappy even when the sun is shining
go when it is cloudy
Appalachia shines most on cloudy days and it just looks prettier in a darker light
It's certainly a forbidding place but I think it has a lot to offer, especially for families and younger travelers on a budget willing to research and plan a bit. I mean sure you have Dollywood and the Smokies and that can be done with minimal planning, but there's all sorts of unusual pockets of randomness where you pull off on a road in the middle of nowhere walk for a bit and suddenly there's a 500 ft gorge below you.