I live in a neighborhood with a bunch of retired people obsessed with yard and garden maintenance, all day, every day, the entire summer. At least 3 of my neighbors already mowed their lawns this past Saturday. I'm holding out until there's something substantial to mow.

To be fair, AC/DC does, in fact, rock.

Ohio, Delaware, and NJ are flat as pancakes and don't have the road challenges we do with the geography and climate coming together into a perfect storm of road maintenance. Also they have fewer cars. (Well Ohio has slightly more registered vehicles, but fewer people, so fewer cars on the road at any given time)

NY has similar climate / geography / number of drivers but it gets to be subsidized by the largest and richest friggin city in the whole damn country.

I think they meant Pitt, since PSU, Pitt, Temple, and Lincoln are the 4 land-grant universities in PA.

I like my house, because the owner lets me sleep there, because they are me.

This has proved to not be a dumb question.

Some things to consider:

1. Moon phase. March 25th is a waxing crescent, which should be great, but if you change dates and end up going during a full moon, then there's going to be a big spotlight in the sky all night long. So if you want to see stuff like the Milky Way, look up a moon phase chart and time your trip appropriately. New moons are ideal. IIRC waxing half moon rises late so it's good for evening viewing while waning half moon sets early so it's good for early morning viewing.
2. Dress warm. Even in the summer. It's cold at night, especially when you're sitting still all night. Layers and blankets are your fiends.
3. There's two viewing areas, separated by a road. There's a parking lot on one side of the road with a viewing field and some seats that are protected from the lights of the lot and the street by a berm. That area is open to any visitors. The other side of the street is only for people camping overnight in the park, and it's the side that has bathrooms and shelters to block the light.
4. The people coming for stargazing I've found to be very friendly and welcoming, but I found the locals to be less so. Surrounding areas have giant signs saying, "This is GOD'S Country" and the like. I have been incoherently yelled at in the past just for looking like I'm from the city. Also the surrounding counties - Potter and Tioga, etc, are known for being one of the state's centers of white supremacist activities. So just be warned and be careful.
5. While I've found the cell reception at the park itself to be pretty good, the surrounding area is a giant cell phone dead zone. You'll be struggling to find a single bar. So bring maps, as in the paper variety. Plan for a low-tech weekend in general. And don't whip out your phone at the park at night without a red filter screen protector or something. Red lights only in the park.
6. Have a backup plan in case of bad weather.

According to US News & World Report, it has a lower crime rate than other cities of similar size and it has been steadily decreasing for decades. But the schools suck.

https://realestate.usnews.com/places/pennsylvania/reading/crime

I think the bulk of Philly commuters live as far west as Montgomery County and into Reading, or as far north as the Lehigh Valley (Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton). Farther west and you're in PA Dutch/Amish country and farther north and you're in the mountains. I don't commute there myself, but I have friends that do in both those directions. Driving in from the west, and taking the train in from the north. There's lots of urban, suburban, and rural places all long there for whatever meets your fancy.

Ok that plan sounds a lot less insane now. My bad.

edit: My bad - apparently there's two Exeter's on that side of the state. I was familiar with the other one of them. In my defense the other Exeter his 5x bigger in both area and population so I had an 80% chance of being right.

Those NEPA towns are 2+ hours from Exeter in non-rush-hour traffic. It's not like Texas where there's cities separated by flat empty space. He'd have to cross a whole mountain range and go around two not-big-but-big-enough-to-have-major-rush-hour-traffic cities. Please consider somewhere between Reading and Philly or he'll be driving 6 hours a day.

In the 90's the oldies stations were playing stuff from the 60's. 30 year gap. 30 years later we should start to hear Foo Fighters on oldies stations.

I showed my wife without context and and she just said, "Put it on a Trapper Keeper".

Your use of political boundaries is confusing the issue and masking what's really going on. The middle class supports the poor. (Technically the rich do too, but there's not many of them to make the bulk of contributions and also the burden they experience by their support is so dramatically smaller than the middle class as to be practically negligible, and they have many, many ways to avoid contributing and holding onto most of their money)

The political entity of Philly makes tons of money in its boundaries, but all that money goes to the people working in Philly. But those people making tons of money in Philly largely don't live there. They live in the surrounding area and commute to Philly to work. That means the city residents themselves are largely poor and need assistance. But by taking the jobs of cleaning, construction, services and so on, they're supporting the people who are making the money that's supporting both them and the parts of the state out in the mountains, outside the metropolitan area. So the Philly metro area sustains both itself and the outside parts that don't contribute in return.

Contrast this with San Antonio, where it's a very large city, takes up almost all of Bexar county, but once you go outside, it's mainly desert and a few scattered towns, mostly along interstates. They don't really have a metropolitan area. That's a city where a lot of the people making money live in the city itself, along with the poorer residents. So in that case the city is kind of a self-sustaining bubble.

A city like New York is a mix of both, with many middle-class people living in the city along with the poor people, but also a huge commuter population as well. New York is just huge, though, so it in a lot of ways plays by its own rules and has unique challenges.

Now let's look at a place like Potter County, PA. There's not a lot of business there. Or people. Or agriculture. No industry, few roads. Few reasons to travel through there and practically no reason to do business there or to stay. There's not really a way to make a living. As a result they're dependent on outside funding, but they also don't make a significant contribution back to the urban areas. They could drop off the face of the earth, the the people working in the cities would only notice that their taxes would go down slightly. In effect, the amount of money being taken out of Potter country to support Philly residents is practically zero. And when you factor in the money being taken out of the Philly metro to support Potter county, the amount is very deep in the negative.

I know that nationwide it's the case that cities financially support the rural areas. Welfare, food stamps, medicaid, all used by substantially larger percentage of the population in rural areas than in cities. And something like 40% of all farm income is from farm subsidies financed by taxes which are primarily paid by people in cities.

I don't know how that translates to the state level, but I don't see any significant reason why it wouldn't be the case there.

For our anniversary my wife and I rented a cabin by Ohiopyle and it was great.

Everyone I know who's been there loves Apteka. I don't. It was all very underwhelming to me. I have no idea what everyone else sees that I don't.

Where I'm at it was all pretty here with all the snow, too. You know, while you were driving through Ohio.

It's a rock in space. It doesn't care how you categorize it.

I have some questions that need to be answered.

• Should Ceres be a planet? It's the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt (by a very wide margin) and is round, and about 9.1 × 10^20 kg. (Pluto is 1.30900 × 10^22 kg, so only about 10x bigger)
• Should Eris be a planet? It's the largest object in the Kuiper belt that we know of. It's also round, and is bigger than Pluto (1.67 × 10^22 kg, so like 25% bigger than Pluto)

Really what's going on is that there's kind of four "zones" of planetoids.

• The rocky planet zone
• The inner asteroid belt (where Ceres is)
• The gas giant zone
• The outer asteroid belt (where Eris and Pluto are)

The definition of planet makes it that it basically rules out the two asteroid belts because who knows where to draw the line between what in there is a planet and what isn't a planet.

So if we're including the stuff in those two zones, where should the line be drawn?

That's a pretty big area for it to be man-made. I would guess a meteor, but during the day they're hard to see, and they often don't leave a trace and just burn up in the atmosphere. Especially if they explode.

Burgatory's poutine? That's probably their best side.

I hate that one. I've never eaten in there but I hope it burns to the ground. When it first opened, it drew so many people that the whole area was gridlocked. Hours at a time, every day, for weeks. I'll never get those hours back where I just wanted to get home from work but no, the drive through line spilled into the road for 300 yards in both directions. Jammed the entirety of Rodi road, from the Parkway to Frankstown.

Whataburger's way better than McDonald's. Better than Hardees. Not better than Five Guys and a lot of the more modern "better burger" chains, though.

I like Burgatory burgers but their sides are not very good. The shakes are good, but those must be hard to mess up.