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Oddly enough, I had the opposite experience when crossing from Connecticut into New York about ten years ago. While New England is nice, the whole thing (lower New England at least, Vermont, etc. is different) feels kind of fake. If I drive to a small town in a rural area, I want it to feel like a small town in a rural area and not a hip part of Pittsburgh (my hometown) transported to the mountains for the benefit of urban emigres. Most of Western Massachusetts and Connecticut is like this. Stately farmhouses with plaques bearing the date of construction and grounds so well-maintained they couldn't have seen any real agriculture for decades. The whole thing broke down when I was in the northwestern corner of Connecticut and I stopped to get breakfast. I had hiked off the AT that morning and was looking for a nice greasy diner and I didn't care how much I paid. The town was handsome and I asked a man on the street if there was a place to get breakfast; he said there was a place right across from where I was and I thanked him and headed there. On my way in I noticed a bookstore near the parking lot that I planned to check out afterwards. I ordered eggs Florentine for 12 bucks, pricey but I wasn't complaining, and was not given the Hollandaise-sauce extravaganza I was expecting but a couple of coddled eggs and a few pieces of baguette. I wasn't anywhere close to full. As I went to check out the bookstore I saw the sign more clearly and noticed that it was a rare bookstore "open by appointment or by chance". There's something off-putting about a small, rural town where one can buy a rare book but can't buy a can of baked beans. As soon as I crossed into New York the whole scene changed and the towns had real businesses like hardware stores and banks and transmission places and the farms smelled like cow shit and it felt like a place people actually lived and not some glorified resort.
That's the trouble when you're making your living from tourism, everything gets turned into the service of "what will attract tourists?" "what kind of unique selling experience can we provide?" and of course "how high can we hike the prices to milk the tourists?". You price out the locals or they are all part of providing the services to the tourists and summer visitors. We get it in Ireland, too.
Any locals probably drive twenty miles to the town with the big box stores and that doesn't depend on tourists in order to buy their tins of beans or a good greasy filling fast-food meal.
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That's sad to hear. I didn't get to spend much time on the ground as I was passing through, so I could have been mistaken, but it seemed like an encouraging sight compared to the parts of the rust belt that I'm more familiar with. I imagine the most picturesque places will always end up as overpriced tourist traps given the economic incentives, but I'd love it if we could raise the bar enough so that everyone had something nice to look at. Basically, more Americana aesthetics and fewer unremarkable strip malls.
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