Gas stations, frequently lots of them, often with long lines, mark the NJ side and only the NJ side of NJ/NY borders. The phenomenon is especially noticeable at Port Jervis NY on the Delaware River, but can be observed at many other border crossings as well.
Though VT does have a distinct lack of billboards, most crossings into the state can be easily identified by virtue of the large signs on stores that read VERMONT! CHEESE! SYRUP! TICKY-TACKY SOUVENIRS! YES YOU ARE TRULY IN OLDE TIME NEW ENGLAND!
At one point some years back I crossed into Missouri from Keokuk, IA. Fireworks on one side, lottery on the other.
I don’t recall the days of uncolored heavily-taxed oleo in WI directly, having grown up in Illinois. But several family stories have to do with my Wisconsin great-aunts, of whom there were many, buying up colored margarine in bulk while on visits to Chicago and smuggling it (their word) back into Wisconsin.
I was a new driver, about 3-4 weeks out solo when I got a weird run involving meeting another driver and swapping trailers with him. There was a delivery there too; it was weird when I was new and after driving for 12 years, it was still weird.
So, I was used to being a new guy when I met up with this other driver. It was his FIRST solo run, so I began to feel a bit superior to him. And he was a lot younger than I was. Anyway, we started talking and he began to tell me how to get to one of our company shops. Now, I knew where the place was and had been there several times, but he was new and showing off what he knew and I thought I’d just let him crow.
Until…
He said something to the effect of “You get off the interstate at the exit with the big fireworks store…” and I just had to stop him. I told him, “Look, EVERY exit off I-44 in Missouri has a big fireworks store. If it doesn’t have a big fireworks store it has a big XXX video store. Or both. If you want a good landmark for that shop, try ‘I-44, exit 88!’.”
Though you could get there via I-44 Exit 84. That’s the exit with the huge Peterbilt dealership.
This is a little different than some of the other answers but I used to travel to work on the Indiana and Ohio borders - Richmond, IN and New Paris, OH to be specific. The state line went right through the parking lot of the hotel that I stayed in. Being a border area, it was impossible to miss the giant billboards adverting whatever was’t available in the other state but there was also one of the largest year-round fireworks stores I have ever seen on the Indiana side.
However, most of that is just normal state border stuff. What made it unusual was that it was also the time-zone boundary between whatever special time zone Indiana had back in early 2000’s and Eastern time. I never realized how much specific times come up on a daily basis but people in the area were masters at time conversion. They had to be because there are literally neighbors in that area that are an hour off from one another at least part of the year and almost all workplaces have employees in both states and time-zones. They clarified everything as being ‘Indiana time’ or ‘Ohio time’ and I had to learn to as well because you get asked for instant clarification if you made the mistake of simply saying "Meet us for dinner at 7:30’.
Right, but the snow doesn’t avoid borders, and CA is less inclined to fix their roads. On the other hand, summer in NV is sometimes constant construction.
Keystone Fireworks! Where un-permitted PA residents can’t shop, and out-of-staters need to take their purchases immediately over the state line. Good times.
Yup. In fact, the road transitions between asphalt and concrete (concrete on the CA side). Concrete may be durable but it really doesn’t age well when you have tons of trucks using chains on it.
The closest thing to a “north-south border” I have seen was in Florida, from suburban Orlando to some of the small towns. The accents immediately went from New York/New Jersey transplant and Puerto Rican to very deep southern, and the culture changed abruptly as well.
Would the Cincinnati, Ohio to northern Kentucky border be an example of a sharp north/south border?
I once drove across northern Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to California. I was headed for the Warner Mountains via Alturas, so I took a shortcut by continuing west from Winnemucca to avoid the interstate’s big detour to the south by way of Reno. At Gerlach, NV a sign proclaimed it “Where the pavement ends and the West begins.” They weren’t kidding. I drove across the desert as the road got more and more unimproved… until the road essentially disappeared altogether. But I kept heading west and eventually got onto a little county road that led to the California border and Modoc County.
My memory tells me that right at the Nevada-California border is where desert abruptly gave way to (irrigated) greenery. Cropland. The border was so sharply defined by the green crops it was like in a cartoon.
Looking at that area today, it seems the irrigated green part didn’t actually start until a few miles into California. But at highway speeds it would have subjectively appeared almost instantly. That was 31 years ago and for all I know there was more irrigation closer to the Nevada border then.