I think the thing you'll struggle witht he most is the weather. It can get very cold here, and we can get gobs of snow. OTOH, you're within reach of Boston and an hour away from Northampton (about as liberal an area as you're going to find in MA). If you like outdoors, the white mountains are just north, the berkshires are just west. Plenty of outdoors stuff.

Worcester is a mixed bag politically, so you'll find both ends of the spectrum, but you'll be able to find comfortable spaces to be yourself and socialize.

But just like any area, making social connections can be hard for some, easy for others.

I was coming down out of Tuckerman Ravine - already close to the end after a great half day of hiking. A couple passes me heading up - they were dressed I swear to god like the guy in this picture. Excep they had one of those string-backpack-thingies, and they carried one bottle of water each. Note this was late season - end of September. I stopped them with a happy greeting "Hey how's it going, beautiful day for a hike, huh?" "yeah" "You guys going up to Hojos?" (blank look) "Errr, where are you going?" "Oh, we thought we'd just go to the top and come back".

Now, it's probably 1pm. It's late season, so lets be charitable and say it was in the mid-60's at the base. They were obviously NOT geared right. "Well, it's a pretty long hike..." "How long?" "Well, if you really hustle, you can make the round trip in 4 hours" "Oh, we have plenty of time! It doesn't get dark until 7!" "Yeah, but... look, you gusy really aren't geared for this. You need better shoes and..." "Cmon Jake, lets go!" - and off they went.

I never saw them again. I don't know if they made it to the summit or not (I'm guessing no), but there were no rescues that I knew of.

You can't fix stupid. The people who think back country hiking is just like a walk in the local state park boggle the mind.

"I know Haymaker". </neo>

To be fair, he did actually duck under one swing. So he knows ONE defensive maneuver.

Instagram is a goddamned dumpsterfire. It's completely overrun with bots and scammers. In the last 3 weeks I've had over 1500 new followers - every single one of them is a bot, and dozens of new IM's "Hi there beautiful" - i'm flattered, but i'm ugly as sin, so fuck off.

Second this place. We get takeout there a lot. Damned good.

You know that's not how state and city governments think. Look at the Big Dig. $21billion spent to make car travel faster and easier. Very little improvement to the rail service. In a lot of ways the big dig just pushed the congestion further into the suburbs, with 93 and the mass pike being regularly at a standstill.

So yeah, 'proper' rail service is politically unfeasible.

Train lines are hideously expensive to build, particularly if there's no right of way already established. There's always people who will not sell part of their property to allow a train line to be run through it.

Bus lines are much much less expensive, and can run over the existing roadways. Until there's a huge commuter need for this type of service, it just doesn't make sense to invest in it.