They don’t call us the Garden State for nothing. Northwest New Jersey is beautiful, very rural with loads of outdoors activities along the Delaware. Central Jersey has Princeton, which along with the gorgeous campus has a super beautiful downtown. There are farmstands with fresh Jersey tomatoes, corn, and peaches all over the place, and we have a bunch of nice wineries!We also have the Pine Barrens (home of the Jersey Devil!) which are beautiful. And despite that stupid MTV show*, the shore is not just loads of drunken assholes. It has tons of boardwalk stuff to do, and the beaches with tags are usually pretty nice. Plus we have Atlantic City!

*(Side note: the cast of Jersey Shore are fucking bennies from New York, they’re not even from NJ.)

When people shit on New Jersey, they’re thinking of Camden (Philly’s fault), Newark (NYC’s fault) and possibly Brick (which is where Redman comes from and which I’m told has improved quite a bit, though I can’t really say as I haven’t been in a while) (nevermind). There are definitely ugly industrial areas of NJ, but that’s not the entirety of the state.

Come visit. Have a pork roll, egg, and cheese on a bagel. Bike down the boardwalk. Spend a day at Great Adventure. Check out Lambertville (and New Hope!). Go tubing down the Delaware. And then when you hear someone bash NJ in the future, you’ll be able to defend us ;)

If you do, you should take a leisurely kayak or canoe trip down one of the little rivers in the Pine Barrens. Very relaxing and somewhat unique in that the water has a red tint from the cedar trees (what we call “cedar water”).

I visited last year and it was delightful. At times I got a bit frustrated with the coastal elitism from people who couldn’t understand why I love my flyover city, but it’s a nice state and it’s definitely a place I’d be happy to move to if I found work there.

New Jersey is fine. A lot of north jersey is overshadowed by NYC being right there. One of my friends moved here from florida, and one of her friends was like “Why don’t you move to jersey city? it’s cheaper” and she went “I didn’t move to new york to live in new jersey”. But even if you do live just outside the city and none of your friends want to visit, you’re still a short train ride away from it.

I don’t know as much about south jersey, but, like, it’s fine. And unlike, I don’t know, Iowa, you can usually get on a train to a world class city.