9 Things Pennsylvanians Miss the Moment They Move Away

You can take a person out of Pennsylvania, but good luck taking Pennsylvania out of the person.

Homesickness rarely starts with the skyline or the mountains.

It starts at a gas station in some other state, when a Pennsylvanian realizes the coffee tastes wrong and there’s no goose on the sign.

These are the things Pennsylvanians miss the moment they move away.

Wawa Runs

Pennsylvanians don’t call it grabbing gas. They call it a Wawa run, and the difference matters.

Wawa started as a dairy farm in Delaware County and opened its first food market in 1964 in Folsom, and the goose on the sign is named after the Lenni-Lenape word for a Canada goose.

You order a hoagie on the touchscreen, you fill up the tank, and you leave weirdly happy.

Then a Pennsylvanian moves somewhere without one and stands in a sad gas station holding a shrink-wrapped sandwich.

The Wawa versus Sheetz argument follows Pennsylvanians out of the state too, and both camps will defend their pick to the death.

A Cold Yuengling

Ordering a beer out of state teaches a Pennsylvanian fast that not everywhere stocks Yuengling.

Back home, you just say “lager” and the bartender pours a Yuengling without asking, because the Pottsville brewery has been part of the furniture since 1829.

D.G. Yuengling & Son is the country’s oldest operating brewery, older than the interstate and older than most of the towns it ships to.

Pennsylvanians who move far enough away spend their first months hunting shelves for that black and gold label.

Some just fill a cooler on their next trip home and haul it back like contraband.

Wooder Ice

Pennsylvanians from the Philadelphia side grow up on water ice, which everyone there pronounces “wooder ice,” and the rest of the country has no idea what that is.

Order a snow cone anywhere else, and you’ll get a cup of crushed ice that misses the point entirely.

Water ice is smooth and fruity and somewhere between a slushie and sorbet, and a Rita’s on a hot day is a rite of passage.

Rita’s got its start in 1984 out of a Bensalem porch window, run by a former Philadelphia firefighter who named it after his wife.

Move away, and the first sticky July afternoon will have a Pennsylvanian craving a mango gelati like an old friend.

Scrapple for Breakfast

Ask a Pennsylvanian about scrapple and watch them defend it to outsiders who wrinkle their nose at the ingredient list.

The Pennsylvania Dutch made it a practice to use every part of the pig, cooking pork scraps down with cornmeal into a loaf you slice and fry crisp.

Fried right, it’s crunchy outside and soft in the middle, and it belongs next to eggs with a little syrup or ketchup.

Try to explain that at a diner in Arizona, the server will stare like you invented it on the spot.

Most grocery stores outside Pennsylvania don’t carry a single brand of it, and that’s when the homesickness hits hardest at the breakfast table.

Primanti Bros.

Pittsburgh Pennsylvanians measure other cities against a Primanti Bros. sandwich, and other cities lose.

The fries and the coleslaw go right inside the sandwich, not on the side, which sounds wrong until the first bite proves it right.

The shop opened in the Strip District in 1933, feeding truckers who needed to eat with one hand while they worked.

A Pennsylvanian who moves away keeps ordering fries on the side out of habit, then piling them onto the bread anyway.

Nobody at the new lunch spot understands why, and explaining it never quite lands.

Hoagies

Call it a sub in front of a Pennsylvanian and prepare for a correction, because in Philadelphia it’s a hoagie and always has been.

Mayor Ed Rendell made the hoagie the official sandwich of Philadelphia back in 1992, which tells you how personal Pennsylvanians take their lunch meat.

The bread does most of the work, crusty outside and soft inside, and the oil and oregano finish the job.

Order the same thing in another state, and you’ll get soft bread and a shrug.

Pennsylvanians who move away spend years chasing that Philadelphia loaf and never quite finding it.

Tastykakes

A Pennsylvanian’s snack drawer growing up held Tastykakes, and no store-brand cake ever measured up after that.

The Tasty Baking Company started in Philadelphia in 1914, and Butterscotch Krimpets and Peanut Butter Kandy Kakes have been lunchbox royalty ever since.

You could send a Pennsylvanian a photo of a Krimpet and start a wave of homesickness in one text.

Move to the West Coast, and the snack aisle offers a hundred cakes. Not one of them is the right cake.

That’s when a care package from home starts to feel like a lifeline.

A Fresh Soft Pretzel

In Pennsylvania, people treat soft pretzels the way other places treat doughnuts, and the state bakes roughly 80% of the country’s pretzels to keep up.

In Philadelphia, you buy them warm from a street cart, folded into that flat twist shape, with a stripe of yellow mustard down the middle.

The soft, chewy, salty ones are a Tuesday snack, not a special occasion.

Then a Pennsylvanian moves and finds only the hard, bagged kind, and it’s just not the same.

A fresh soft pretzel from a corner cart is the taste transplants describe when they say they miss home.

The Turnpike

Pennsylvanians gripe about the Turnpike constantly, and then they miss it the second they leave.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike opened in 1940 as the country’s first long-distance superhighway, tunneling through the mountains and all.

You know its rest stops by name, you know which tunnels back up on a holiday, and you know the toll is going to sting.

Drive a stranger’s highway in a new state, and there’s no muscle memory to lean on.