Everyone always talks about that the trees turning colors for the Fall in the East is absolutely gorgeous. Well, in my opinion it was just okay. I would say that any canyon in Utah has a far prettier array of trees through the Fall. Half of the trees here turned colors and then lost most of their leaves in the short time frame of about a week. And now for the entire rest of Fall there are still trees slowly changing colors, but with all of the trees that are dead there really isn't much of a great grandeur about it. I wondered that maybe it wasn't a good Fall this year, but after hearing a few people remark at how beautiful Fall has been I am guessing that this is pretty typical.
Enough about seasons, I thought I would share with you the biggest reason that I HATE living in Pennsylvania. And no, I am not going to tell you its the fast windy roads that make you lose your lunch or the incredibly slow freeway speeds. Those come in at a close second, but the biggest thing that I dislike about Pennsylvania is all of the smoking that happens. It is the reason that I hate going outside. Whenever going to Walmart for groceries (there are no close grocery stores at all and people thought that Grantsville was far from stores) I ALWAYS am accosted by cigarette smoke. People always light up when walking to and from the store and will sit in their car to have a smoke. The front entrance of Walmart reeks of cigarette smoke and I feel like I get lung cancer every time I go buy groceries.
I wondered if Pennsylvania was high on the list of states that smoked so I looked it up and here is what I found.
Pennsylvania ranks in at 33rd (1 being the least smokers) with 22.4% smokers. So they aren't the worst smoking state, I can't even imagine living in a state worse than PA! I would die. I would like to state that Utah has the least smokers at 11.8%. No surprise there. California is the next best state with 13.7% smokers. It kind of surprised me that California was so good. I never felt accosted by smoking growing up, but guess I kind of figured that most states were like CA. Well, to have only ever lived in states where smoking is much lower Pennsylvania seems terrible.
On a side note, Pennsylvania's tax on cigarettes isn't terribly high at $1.60/pack compared to New York who taxes $4.35/pack (they have the highest tax). We heard that people in New York often drive just south of their border into Pennsylvania to buy their cigarettes. Enough about that.
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