Having grown up in the Northwest and lived on the West Coast my whole life, I think my expectations of how beautiful the Northeast would be was a bit skewed by

Having grown up in the Northwest and lived on the West Coast my whole life, I think my expectations of how beautiful the Northeast would be was a bit skewed by media/popular culture. I really enjoyed my first trip to to Boston/Portland/Acadia, but TBH, the more rural areas felt a lot more like a Disneyland version of nature curated for tourists from the "big city". It didn't live up to the hype, which I think is targeted at people who have lived in the hyper-dense-and-flat Boston/DC/NYC area and nowhere else. I'm really not trying to dump on the area, it was quite nice, I'm just saying no more so than most rural places I'm used to. Of the whole trip, frankly, Portland was my favorite. It felt "just right" in terms of size and culture.