It's gorges or whatever

I made a similar drive once and I kept looking up at those ridges and wondering how hard it would be to climb to the top of them. I pulled over at one point and gave one a try, and I can say: it's insanely fucking hard. Like, I think I would have died if I hadn't turned around and gone back down to my car.

Well I’m from Utica and our jokes have punchlines

WE ARE REAL. WE EXIST.

315 represent

I am proud to drive through upstate NY on the way to skiing or Niagara falls!

We should petition the horror movie guild.

A sketchy dispensary, maybe? I feel like that scene is usually more about getting the beer than the gasoline.

Don't most zombie movies already have a trip to a store like that?

And they're all owned by the same company

I used to live in Daytona and there was a spot with a Dollar General, a Family Dollar and a Dollar Tree all within maybe 200 feet of each other. For good measure there was also a Super-Whipper store - a little store that sold nothing but $1 plastic whisks and was never open. I've never before or since seen less effort put into a drug money-laundering scheme.

In the south its much the same, but lots of confederate and trump flags.

New York City is located in the southeastern corner of the state, so "upstate NY" means basically everything north/west of the NYC metro area. It's a word that is pretty much exclusively used for New York.

To further clarify expr's explanation, most people are familiar with new york only by way of new york city. Shockingly (/s), new york city, a city confined by small island and shoreline with a population of 8 million+, is an entirely different beast than the entire state with a slightly larger population. So people generally differentiate upstate new york with the moniker to explicitly refer to how it is different; mainly being rather rural outside of the 'minor' metropolitan areas like albany. The 'up' part is because most folks think of north as 'up' due to maps being oriented that way.

Nooooo ... You were supposed to say "What's upstate dog?“

Wait... I might be confusing it with something else.

Northern part of the state, it's not an official description and everyone will have a different definition of where upstate starts.