Same when going from the Netherlands to Belgium.

I'll never forget driving home from college with some friends for the holidays one year. I was from PA, he was from Ohio and had never been more east. We were headed to NY with another friend and our route took us briefly through Jersey.

"How will we know we're there?" he asked as the car suddenly lurched and felt like we hit a gravel road despite ostensibly being a paved highway ...

New Jersey?

QT: Free air, Roller grills.

And much more. Not good prices though, they know how to separate customers from their cash pretty well.

Grew up near the US/Canadian border, there is a line of white rocks that tell you it's the border.

You start seeing sap buckets hanging off utility poles.

Ok, this is bonkers. Although the risk of contamination with foreign insects via transit is real (we e.g. imported the Tiger Mosquito from the US via tire shipments from the U.S. into Europe some years ago...), using that as an excuse to search passenger cars is quite a stretch...

Leaving South Carolina to enter North Carolina or Georgia, the roads are so much better and there’s a noticeable decrease in overall loudness in road noise.

There is a body of water under the bridge, toll collection booths right before or right after the bridge crossing. Also GPS confirms it.

Yeah I would hardly call Ned Lamont a governor.

Holy fucking shit the SC roads are B A D

The lines on a map are actually painted on the ground. It's amazing to see the one running along the bottom of Lake Tahoe.

North Carolina paves its roads. South Carolina air drops its roads.

You know you have crossed into South Carolina when the suspension of your vehicle is torn out from under you.

Mayor of the town of Connecticut.

There was no line when I saw it while in basic training; just a nice, 20-foot-wide laneway of cleared trees and mown grass, just perfect for tromping along. Armed.

And that's how we may have accidentally invaded America.

I love that the Dutch talk the same way about the Belgian roads

Also wherever the last hills are within 10 miles of the border there is a guaranteed police officer sitting on the other side out of view pointing a lidar at the top of the hill so when you go over they can clock all your speeds. More so on whichever border county is keeping their side up better.. but if your heading to say Georgia you can tell your almost to Georgia because you can see the Florida cops waiting for the people heading South on the other side of the road.

(Although in Florida they often lack the hills to hide behind so they often use bushes, drainage ditches and overpass walls to hide behind.).

More than a 2500 different types of palm trees/bushes. And on 75/95, they are going to be invested with pigs.

Yeah, but… as you say. It’s an excuse. Give war on drugs people an opening, they take it. Anything to oppress the poors.

What's the point of putting the governor name on the road sign? How is that information useful to drivers?

It usually depends on how big the road is that you're driving on. Most state borders are in very extremely rural areas, so sometimes there's not even a sign. On interstate highways it's always quite obvious, but little country roads might not have any signage at all.

• There's usually no obvious change in architecture, no; often the only architecture is farm buildings, and those are more or less consistent architecturally. And broadly speaking architecture is regional, rather than state-specific; the difference in architecture from northern Indiana to southern Indiana is far more pronounced than the difference in architecture from southern Indiana to northern Kentucky, for instance.

• As noted elsewhere, sometimes the infrastructure can be different (usually seen in road quality), but most states tend to number their county roads in different ways, so when you cross the border you'll often find that the number of the roads you're crossing tend to suddenly shift from "300W" to "2300E." The signage may also change very slightly, though if you're truly out in the middle of nowhere, there might not be any signage to change.

• Agriculture, like architecture, is usually much more defined by region than by state. All of the states around mine farm corn, wheat, and soybeans, just like mine does. Most also farm cows, though Kentucky notably has a lot more horses than any of its neighbors, so that can be a tell. But you don't get into a ton of ranching until you get further west, and then you see large changes across multiple states at a time.

• Store brands often do change, but again, since most crossings are in rural areas, there often aren't any stores around to notice the change right away. You'll roll out of a state with a lot of Meijer stores and into a state where Publix is the regional grocery store, but until you get into a town, there's no way to know.

• Culture is probably the thing you'll notice least. People who live in rural areas tend to think of themselves as American before any other identifier, so you'll find a lot of jingoism anywhere on both sides of any border. American flags, Christian crosses, gigantic emotional support pickup trucks, bizarrely aggressive patriotic bumper stickers, Trump signs and flags, etc. Depending on where you are those sorts of things are accompanied by very clear signs of deep poverty (mobile homes, trash-strewn lawns, run-down houses), but they can just as often be on or around very well-kept houses on huge acreage.

• And if you mean "culture" in the sense of theater, music, etc., you're unlikely to find any at all near a state border.

I guess the other thing is that Google Maps will tell you "Welcome to (state)" when you're navigating. There are some times that that's the only way you'll know.