Pennsylvania
Discover Pennsylvania
Introduction
Pennsylvania holds the documents and the ground the United States was argued into existence on. The Declaration and the Constitution were both written and signed in Philadelphia, and the war's decisive battle was fought at Gettysburg.
It is also two cities at opposite ends of a large rural state, and they have little in common. Philadelphia faces the Atlantic seaboard and is the older, denser and more European of the two; Pittsburgh sits 300 miles west where three rivers meet, built on steel and rebuilt since it collapsed.
Between them are the Appalachians, the Amish farmland of the southeast, and hard-coal country in the northeast — an industrial history that is visible everywhere and still being worked through.
The distances are real. This is a big state, and treating it as a single destination is the most common planning mistake.
