Americans and Europeans (including Brits) kinda think of the USA as an ordinary-sized country

[conuly]

And we're both exceedingly wrong, but at least Americans grasp that it takes about a week to drive from NY to CA if you plan to stretch your legs when you eat and then sleep at night, and that a plane flight from NYC to LA will take about the same amount of time as a flight from NYC to London.

Of course, the flipside is that we think, eg, France is quite a small country because, after all, it's only the size of one American state, and the fact that that state is Texas doesn't change things much.

All this is to say, and I'm not naming names here, but please take this into account when making travel plans and/or writing fic.

Comments

One Canadian's Domestic Road Travel

[dewline]

I'm remembering the cross-country vacations my parents took me and my siblings on at the start of my teens. Charlottetown one year, Nanaimo the next. Each took about a week in each direction from Regina (and another week to get back). Partly because my father liked camping along the way as a cost-control measure, and visiting co-workers and relatives also helped with that.

[fox]

Conversely, when we lived in England for a year when I was a kid, we did day trips that my dad’s colleagues thought should have taken the weekend and weekend trips they wouldn’t have dreamed of taking if it wasn’t half-term. “Why, that’s clear on the other side of the country!” they’d say, and sure, it was, but that was only a couple of hours in the car.

[calimac]

My experience in England is that, despite the short distances, it takes twice as long to get anywhere as you'd expect in the US.

[movingfinger]

It's like the roads have special friction built into them to make the place seem larger. Even the highways!

[fox]

I think that’s probably true (I was 11 then, and in the years I spent in the UK as an adult I didn’t drive or even really get around much), but even if a two-hour drive in England only covers half the mileage of a two-hour drive over here, it was the very idea of driving two hours after work on a Friday that my dad’s local colleagues (teachers, btw, so their workday ended earlier than some other folks’) found astonishing.

[pensnest]

I wonder if driving after work on a Friday evening would be generally more stressful in the UK because the roads are so crowded? I have the luxury of not having to travel, most of the time, on a Friday evening, and I'd definitely rather not do so!

[dorchadas]

This matches the reddit post I saw where someone (British) said they saw their grandparents rarely because they lived so far away and when asked, it turned out to be 80 miles away. Cue multiple Americans saying they drove more than that every day for work.

[conuly]

Reminds me of the time - a good decade ago now, but still - when I was talking to people online about the NYC DOE policy regarding phones in schools and pointing out that being able to contact your parents is pretty essential when you have to leave school and coordinate picking up a younger sibling, dropping them off at daycare, and then getting to a job or afterschool activity - and that no, "run home first" doesn't make any sense if school is over an hour away from home.

Cue a lot of "Oh, but who goes to school that far away?" comments from people both not in NYC and, I'm guessing, not in a super rural area either. In NYC, the answer to that question is "lots of people, actually", and I'm thinking it's the same out in the boonies.

[robby]

If you believe half of what they write, they also go around "knocking people up" in the morning!

[conuly]

*laugh track*

[imhilien]

I live in New Zealand and tourists think 'oh, it's so small, we can travel around quickly'. We have a lot of winding roads, so no.

We also have to explain to tourists there's no 'ferry over to Australia', it's three hours by plane...

[larryhammer]

Which makes Australia's standing offer to admit New Zealand as a seventh state all the more hilarious. (Is that still a thing? Last I heard of it was a while ago.)

[adrian_turtle]

3 hours by plane seems comparable to the distance between Washington state and Alaska. And quite a bit less than the distance between California and Hawaii. So the distance doesn't seem like an insurmountable barrier.

[imhilien]

I'm not sure. Australia can be part of New Zealand, we can call it West Island. :D

[fred_mouse]

You can have the Eastern States (which is everything East of WA, from my perspective), and then we can have Western Australia and West Island (NZ).

[imhilien]

Hooray! :-p

[conuly]

So it's... *thinks* - about the same distance as Hawaii from California?

[larryhammer]

Almost exactly -- AU-NZ is 110mi further.

[elayna]

I remember the first time I went to the UK and everything that seemed like such a big deal travel-wise in books or movies instead felt so tiny to me. I had no sense of perspective between the USA and the UK, and of course, I was reading-watching a lot of historical shows where distances in carriages took a whole lot more time than driving in America. That was quite a 'wow' experience for me, my gosh, this country is teeny!

[conuly]

Yellowstone Park is half the size of Wales.

[chanter1944]

What's the expression, to people in Europe, 100 miles|clicks is a long way, while to people in the States, 100 years is a long time? :)

[conuly]

100 years is always 4 or 5 generations, so.

[chanter1944]

True. I think the expression was referring to national history, and it definitely doesn't take First Nations perspectives into account.

[antisoppist]

The weekend before Christmas it took me 7 hours each way to drive 200 miles in the UK to visit my parents "the other side of the country". South-west to south-east. In horrible rain in often non-moving traffic. Felt like an exhausting expedition.

I have lived in Finland where driving 2 hours to the nearest supermarket was entirely normal and reasonable but they have far fewer people on their roads!

[pensnest]

I have to admit to being horrified at the idea of a 16-hour drive to get somewhere... but you're right about how annoying the misconceptions are. It's not hard to open an atlas!

But England has about 53 million inhabitants, all packed in to a really quite small area. It's one of the most densely populated countries in the world, so there are a lot of cities and towns and villages all over the place, and therefore a lot of cars on the many roads. It really does take a lot longer to travel that 100 miles here, or conversely, you'd not get nearly so far in two hours of driving in England as you would in (most of?) the USA. Which is probably why the idea of driving for 16 hours horrifies me!

[titti]

Meanwhile I live in NY and I'd rather do a 16 hour drive to Florida, because at least it means that I'm driving, that the 5 miles to get to my mother's since that takes me over 40 minutes on a normal day and it's taken us as long as 2 hours during holidays.

[silveradept]

The idea of being able to cross multiple countries in a day while traveling in continental Europe is a thing that's always slightly boggling. If I thought about it much more like crossing multiple states in a day, that would be easier, but I'd probably have to envision the correct states to make it work. (As someone who did most of the country in about three days with some detours and stops, but only crossed about ten states all told?)