This is actually pretty similar to what some coworkers visiting from EU wanted to do.
They were here on a two week work trip and I asked them what they were doing for their weekend. It was something like “We rented a car and are going to go to New Orleans, then to Nashville, up to New York City, over to the Grand canyon, and maybe San Francisco if we have time before we head back to the office”
I had to explain that the state we were in was larger than their country and they couldn’t cover that much ground in two days even if they only drove and didn’t stop once.
We had a good laugh and then just did a hike on Saturday :)
Edit : “in Europe 100km is a long distance and in the US 100 years is a long time”. Forget where I heard that but it seems accurate
I once saw a post from an American guy visiting family in Germany. They borrowed him a car so he could visit other family about 400KM away.
The family that owned the car spend an entire day getting it checked out by a mechanic, making sure all the fluids where fine, getting the tire pressure just right, etc.
He thought it was pretty funny because he drove double that distance every week just to go to work.
That is a British saying about Americans vs. Brits.
I sadly see this all the time unironically. Met a German family who arrived in North Carolina with plans to go to Disney Land. Not World. Land
“Isn’t California just on the other side of the country?”
Yeah it is
How do people not check driving times in this modern age?
America is pretty unique in size. If you’re used to shorter trips even overestimating wouldn’t be half the drive through america. Especially Europeans as a long drive is anything over 20m when its measured in hours they’re considering booking accommodations for sleep and such. The perception of time is incredibly different.
Unique in size? Lol the US is big, there are lots of other big countries
It’s the second biggest “Western” country. It’s about twice as big as the EU, about as big as the whole of Europe with about the same population, so it’s mostly empty in the middle.
The obverse would be an American who wants to go to Europe, start out in Madrid, lunch in Copenhagen and fly back from Istambul.
But the US isn’t unique in size. It’s right next to two big countries, with Canada being even bigger, Europeand are familiar with Russia that’s the biggest country in the world, it’s not like people don’t know about China, Brazil and how they’re yuge…
Technically the US is unique in size. Name another nation that is 9.8 million km2. Canada is 10 million km2,Russia is 17.1 million km2, China is is 9.6 million…
So to say it is ‘unique in size’ is technically correct, the best kind of correct!
Hah well you got me there
Sure but the context of the discussion is Europe vs US
That’s why I’m saying “second biggest”, that doesn’t mean it’s unique.
European here, although our countries are smaller. 20 mins is quite obviously a short drive.
UK is pretty small but it still takes 7 Hours to get from Glasgow to london and I can’t imagine anyone booking overnight accommodation for that drive. That’s two major cities with 100% motorway/freeway driving, I haven’t even brought up Cornwall.
I drive 5h for family within England on a monthly basis.
Your comment is naive.
Eh id still be inclined to stay over in Manchester or something to break that up, especially on holiday.
My family that still lives there stay overnight for trips like that. Me on the other hand: drove across Canada and would drive 4 hours, nap for 20 minutes, repeat…because hotels were expensive and my plan of campsite tenting overnight was just too much setup and take down after the first day.
Canada is as wide… And in a sense longer because everything is so sparse.
The way I try to communicate it is to ask them to imagine someone taking a vacation to the whole EU, because America is much closer in scale to that
Conversely, I, as an American who had the opportunity to spend a few months in Germany, was surprised at how close all the countries were.
Great culture in all the places I went (Brussels and Prague were my two standout favorites!) Traveling was hella cheap. The food was fire everywhere I went. The architecture was INCREDIBLE. And the knowledge that you could go to the hospital for less than $100 was nuts. Don’t even get me started on how legitimately cool it is to sit in a 1000 year old pub.
I didn’t want to come back. I nearly cried when I got the return flight info.
It still shocks me to tell people “Yeah, I lived in Germany for a bit and some weekends we would fuck off to France.”
The borders of European countries are great because there’s all this security infrastructure that they’ve built but then they don’t use any of it. There’s always just a bunch of ballads and you have to drive around little security checkpoints but there’s never anyone around.
My personal favourite is Geneva which is kind of just an extended bit of Switzerland because the city was already there, but really by any logical sense it should be in France. So they deal with that by basically just ignoring it, and people just pop to and fro all the time.
There are often crossings where the infrastructure is a road-side sign. Interstate crossings at state borders are often more significant.
I submitted a job application once to Freiburg. One of the main reasons was that if I’m unhappy with the food selection, both France and Switzerland is something like 20kms away
I loved Prague too. Had a local guide that took me to cool places, I drank a lot. 👍
Shout out the 1 hour 45 minute drive from JFK to just over the bridge into Jersey
Lmao cycling is faster according to Google
There’s a reason why New Yorkers are much fitter than the average American lol.
Holy crap, just shoot me out a cannon, I’ll get there sooner or die, either is preferable
“Would you like to try this alternate route that saves you negative 13 minutes and negative $5.44?”
Coming into the city through the tunnel was wild. Huge contrast in the amount of traffic.
I walked around Jersey City for Pokemon Go fest, and it was a ghost town. It was so surreal lol. Right off the PATH train there’s no one.
Fly into Newark. Nobody in nj uses JFK or laguardia.
In OP’s image they “land” in NYC and drive to Miami. You would drive the route I posted to leave NYC.
Their transportation:
I had relatives over from wales visiting my grandmother in canberra. "Come, drive up for the day! "
Bitch i live in melbourne. The drive alone is longer than your entire “kingdom”
Ha, I had to drive 8 hours to get to the nearest airport when some one on site had a personal emergency
Wales is a principality. Victoria is about the same area as England btw.
Nope.
Victoria (Australia): About 228,000 km².
United Kingdom: About 243,610 km².
England: About 130,281 km².Wales is a part of the UK, the “kingdom” of which i speak. Or did you think i was talking of the lands of Llywelyn the last?
(Btw: the uk is about 600km long. Melbs to canberra is 665km)
It’s a constituent country of UK. Principality ended in the mid 1500s, and became an official country in 2011.
it’s actually not as bad as I thought it would be
It only assumes 120 km/h average speed for 55h
Remember that mapping programs only give “travel time”, not “total trip time.” that 19 hour drive from NY to FL is 19 hours in the car, on the highway. Realistically, that’s a 2-3 day trip.
FL to NV is, likewise, 37 hours on the highway. So, same as your office job for a week, but instead of working you’re just driving in a car.
With a little elbow grease and knowing where cops might be, you could work those numbers down. ;)
I have to have the road trip conversation with friends before we do anything. It’s like, do we want to make this leisurely and the drive is fun, because that’s going to need an itinerary and planned stops, or is the destination all that matters? Because I can make that 37 hour drive in about 38, give or take. Most of the time, I’d prefer it that way. Roadside destinations and ‘gotta stop here’ restaurants are always pretty lame, in my experience.
Ah, to be young and childless and have sufficient privilege where staying awake for a day and a half doesn’t mess you up for the whole week
Clearly they’ve never heard of the cannonball run.
We had family visit from the UK many years ago. They said after they visited Niagara Falls, they wanted to “pop over” to Prince Edward Island to see Anne of Green Gables. That is an 18h drive if you don’t even stop to pee. They finally realized how big Canada really is when somebody showed them a map of England superimposed on a map of Canada.
I mean, it is also about how much time you have in the vacation and how much it feels like a “once in a lifetime” thing, where you take more hardships to check all the “highlights”. Like, when we spend 2 weeks in Australia we drove crazy distances, because I don’t know whether I will ever be there again. Same for US tourists in Europe, even in this thread “oh, we did Lissabon, London, Paris, Prague and Zagreb”. No European would ever cram that into 4 weeks. But if you have the opportunity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When backpacking in China we went from Shanghai to the border of Tibet. Crazy distances again, but we wanted to cover snow capped mountains and Shanghai, solely because of “well, while we’re at it”. I mean, it felt like we already travelled half-way back home, only to come back to Shanghai to take the return trip.
Anyway, TL;DR: I don’t think it’s underestimating the size, but a FOMO on a “once in a lifetime” vacation.
Why would you even go there ? Go to Canada
LGTM!
😂😂😂 They’re in for a surprise. I can drive 2 hours and still be in my state.
I can drive for two hours and still be in the same roundabout.
I can drive 7 hours and still be on the same roundabout.
I can drive 2 hours in still be in Austin.
could that really be called driving?
That’s not really impressive. I can drive 5 hours and still be in the same state. In Germany.
I had a car like that once.
I can drive 2h and be in jail (I don’t have my driver’s license).
I can drive two hours and still be in my county! (It’s stupid).
We have like 120 counties. Dunno why.
More like 190 or so.
I can drive 8 hours and still be in my shithole state and it’s not even Texas.
I’m actually curious. Putting aside alaska, is there any competition for longest highway in a state? I could imagine florida and california both having roads that could rival texas’ longest. Maybe if it’s a really windy one in montana or wisconsin.
No clue but the longest road in the US is 3,365 miles long 5,415 in kilometers.
Not to brag, but the longest Road in Europe is 8641km (5369 miles) long. Though to be fair, it’s only partially in Europe, the last 4000 (±1000 as there’s no clear border between Europe and Asia) kilometers are in Asia. The longest road that is completely in Europe is only 5190 km (3225 miles) long.
Dam, if I drive an hour the right direction in in Sweden
Same here, but that’s where I started.
I’d guess you could find a 2 hour straight line in any state without crossing a border, except maybe Rhode Island.
Looks like Delaware might just qualify as well, and Connecticut if it actually had a major roadway on the diagonal from the SW to NE might as well, but the routing Google is giving me goes just over 2h
Haha yes!
I remember travelling to family in Canada and asking if we could go to Disneyland. In Florida.
Disney Land is in California.
World is in Florida
Shows what my 12 year old mind knows.
Don’t you have to be at least 13 to post on Lemmy
Does Lemmy follow laws? Thats new. The hivemind doesn’t adhere to your human constructs.
It takes like a week to drive from NY to CA.
Realistically 4 days with ~12 hour drives will get you there including lunch and gas stops.
Something like NY - Toledo - Omaha - SLC - SF
Sure it might look easy on a map but driving 2,000+ miles all at once can be pretty hard on a car & a human. Don’t be surprised if you need to stop for an oil change, new tires, alignment, fix cracks in the windshield from 18-wheelers kicking up rocks. Then there’s weather & natural disasters, physical limitations, hands & butt go numb driving 12 hours straight, need to take breaks for physical exercise & sanity checks. I’ve driven across USA 5x. At least three of those things happened each time. Budget AT LEAST 7 days.
How the fuck do you need an oil change, tyres, and wheel alignment over that short distance? I could understand needing one of those if the trip was short notice and you didn’t have time to do it before leaving, but all three are ridiculous.
Also, unless your driver’s seat is a plank, no, your butt doesn’t go numb.
Lol I was reading that and wondering if the op was driving a 1930s ford with all his belongings strapped to the top.
The Joad family off to California.
Right? Most of those are all the kinds of regular maintenance things you button up BEFORE a long trip. Windshield cracks are usually either quick fixes or fixes that can be delayed or patched until you finish the trip.
Frequent enough stops to limits butt pain and blood clots isn’t such a bad idea though.
You have no right to tell me what my butt does or doesn’t do.
Europeans: METRIC MAKES EVERY MEASUREMENT COMPREHENDABLE
ALSO EUROPEANS:
Well it probably doeant help that nothing in the states is metric lol
Youre more likely to find a map measured in football fields or hamburgers at most places
comparing internet comments when americans can’t locate a 2000 sq mile city-state with an unpronounceable name on a map in central eastern europe versus when europeans fail to understand the scale of a damn continent on the same map is some wild contrast ngl.
if you don’t realize that a country which spans most of a major continent (which you have seen depicted next to your own continent on every world map for your entire life) is not the same size as spain or france, then the issue is much deeper than nationality.
Bullshit aside, I wonder how common this is in Europe. I’m absolutely not going to defend our (USA) education level, especially when we’re working on one-upping 1939 Germany. But, I wonder if for some Europeans being actually blind to this sort of stuff (post is obviously a joke) it has to do with the density of Europe, or if it has to do with conflict being distracting or sustainability being fulfilling.
I think some people might be blind to the actual distance.
But it’d mostly have to be the older generations.
You can’t exactly be blind to distances if you use Google Maps nowadays. It’d mostly have to be unprepared older folks or stupid youngsters.
It’d be an indication of intelligence more than being European. I’d NEVER go plan a trip without… Checking the distances between attractions I want to visit?
But my aunt and uncle didn’t when they came to visit me in France from their tiny island. For them 35 min of travel was impossible.
Maps measure in miles AND kilometers here you have no excuse
Its all beans mate
Edit: about 350,000,000 wide
That’s a lot of toast
Speaking of by large distances, how long was it after the USA walked on the moon until any country in Europe did?
The Saturn V is a great example of German engineering.
Exactly “nobody cares” years
Y’all seem to have gotten so butthurt you assumed i wasnt american. Big oof lmao. Have fun with that
Take the Amtrak at Penn Station at this point
