I'm sorry you were apathetic. Spending your off duty time in bars and restaurants being homesick must not have been fun. Of course, if Dixie were so blah, why did you spend nine years there?
Where was your curiosity or interest in the areas where you were stationed? Hopefully you toured some of the old forts, battlegrounds, plantations, museums, and gardens in those states. Was the local architecture not of interest to you? Did you not venture inland to see the mountains, forests, swamps, and boiling springs? Were you not captivated by the beauty of South Carolina's coastal marshes or the coral reefs in southern Florida or the white sand beaches in the Pensacola area?
Knock it off, you just made me want to have some low country boil...
I was on active duty and went where I was ordered to go.
Where was your curiosity or interest in the areas where you were stationed? Hopefully you toured some of the old forts, battlegrounds, plantations, museums, and gardens in those states.
I wasn't the Civil War buff that I am now so I confess that I didn't take advantage of the surroundings as I could have.
Was the local architecture not of interest to you? Did you not venture inland to see the mountains, forests, swamps, and boiling springs? Were you not captivated by the beauty of South Carolina's coastal marshes or the coral reefs in southern Florida or the white sand beaches in the Pensacola area?
Not really, no. We have beautiful areas up North, too, and those down South were no more or less attractive. The Flint Hills in Kansas, the lakes and rivers and forests of Wisconsin and Minnesota, the rural areas of Vermont or New York or any other area of the North in the fall when the leaves are changing, the Great Lakes shore line. I'd put any of them on a par with your beaches and marshes and hills of the South. We have amazing architecture up here as well. Frank Lloyd Wright did his best work in the Chicago area and examples of his creations are all over.
I think that the difference is that I like diversity and people down South want everything to be the same. Growing up in Chicago you could go from one end of Lawerence Avenue to the other and literally travel the entire world by passing through different neighborhoods. Mexico, Puerto Rico, Poland, Ukraine, Sweden, Ireland, Russia, Israel, China, Korea all were clustered on or near Lawrence or Clark or points east and west. Amazing restaurants and music, fascinating people. Maybe I'm wrong but one thing I notice about the South and its people is you don't like change. You don't go for different. When you're home you want everything to be just like you, and get upset when it's not. New Orleans is as close as you come to ethnic, and even then it's Southern and Cajun and a lot of you all don't seem to value it. Confederatetrappedinthemidwest doesn't like what he politely terms 'minorities'. Well in the North everyone is a minority in some way or another, and while it causes tensions in some ways it's also what makes us interesting. While Confederatetrappedinthemidwest laments that Katrina didn't do the job to his satisfaction, I'm thinking where we would be without Dixieland jazz, or Memphis or Chicago or Kansas City jazz. So maybe that's why I was underwhelmed by the South, too much sameness. Maybe that's why it isn't home and could never be home. And I'm sure that's why people like Confederatetrappedinthemidwest or Beckysueb can't stand the North. Too much different for their tastes. That doesn't make them better than me or me better than them. It is what it is.
The Great Smokey Mountains are just breathtaking. Newfound Gap is absolutely majestic! You can just see forever up there. And Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga. I love the mountains. I could never leave them.