San Diego is not considered boring people. People need to leave this forum once in a while and get with reality not a buch of city nerds that just talk cities. Any city west of Pittsburgh and east of Oakland (remember, Miami is just east of Pittsburgh
).
People on the coast or in Chicago think any other city out there is just a giant boring group of people that happen to live near each other.
I already knew this, but after living on the east coast and being in the Northeast urban corridor for four years, this has been confirmed. People just don't know and honestly, they are missing out.
This sounds absurd, but people in Baltimore or Boston should have as much interest in visiting Kansas City or Minneapolis as those in Kansas City or Minneapolis have in visiting Baltimore or Boston.
But they don't and they don't. Why? Because they think they are boring places and would be a waste of time.
We often go to places in the big cities out here and think wow, this kinda sucks compared to back home. You can put the DC and Baltimore Zoo together and it would still suck compared to Omaha's or St Louis's zoo.
Just because something is in DC or NYC or Boston or San Francisco does not make it a great place or attraction or museum etc. Just because it cost twice as much to enter or just because there are always thousands of obnoxious foreign tourists that won't put down the cameras long enough to enjoy whatever they are trying to enjoy does not mean that you can't find similar cultural attractions in cities that only draw from a few hundred miles in the midwest, south and mountain west.
Once you have seen the major tourist attractions in NYC, Philly, DC etc like the Liberty Bell, Mall Museums and Rockefeller Center, you really don't have THAT much more more to do in Boston or Philly than you do in St Louis or Minneapolis. Honestly, I think there is less to do because cities in the midwest go out of their way to provide family and other types of regional attractions that you want to revisit while places like Philly or DC tend to not do as well with that. And what they do have tend to be more run down, more crowded and more expensive.
So all of them. Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Nashville, Charlotte, etc. Small metros like Little Rock and Omaha tend to also have more to do than people would ever imagine of a smaller metro. Kansas City because of its name and perceived location gets a terrible rap despite it having more to do than cities twice its size. St Louis and Minneapolis are very large metro areas with tons to do that people on the coast have simply no idea about.
In the end, there are not many "boring" cities. There are a few that are more boring for their size. OKC, Houston and Sacramento come to mind, but they still have plenty to do.
But I think the more middle of the country a city is, the more boring people tend to think the places are. Kansas City, St Louis, Minneapolis, Omaha (Omaha is smaller but offers a lot for its size) even Denver to some degree because people that do visit go straight to the mountains and rarely take in the city itself, not realizing that because those places are more remote, they tend to be even more self sustaining as far as things to do. The second tier of cities that people think are boring, but not as bad as those deep in flyover country are Cincinnati, Charlotte, Birmingham, etc.
Then you have cities that are overrated like Austin and Portland which are great cites, but in reality don't have as much to do as some of the "boring" places that nobody wants to visit.
Disclaimer. I have been to every single major and midsized metro(400k and up) in the USA at least a few times, most of them many more. They are all fun to visit and none are really "boring". Everybody should make an effort to visit as many cities as they can despite what they may think they do or don't offer. Most of the time such preconceived images are way off base.
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