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it’s actually not as bad as I thought it would be
It only assumes 120 km/h average speed for 55h
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.
Their transportation:
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
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
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
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.
😂😂😂 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 had a car like that once.
I can drive 8 hours and still be in my shithole state and it’s not even Texas.
Dam, if I drive an hour the right direction in in Sweden
Same here, but that’s where I started.
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 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)
upvote for Gulf of Mexico
Ahem, it’s the Gulf of America. Please get your facts right
why is this being downvoted, have y’all never heard of sarcasm?
Sorry, I should have tagged it properly.
Warning! Sarcasm ahead.
<sarcasm>Ahem, it’s the Gulf of America. Please get your facts right</sarcasm>
Edit: Jerboa eating me tags. Let us try it this way:
<sarcasm>Ahem, it’s the Gulf of America. Please get your facts right</sarcasm>
Edit2: <p contenteditable=“true”>while we’re at it, why not try <mark>further</mark></p>
Edit3: Thanks for the gold, kind <del>strangler</del> <ins>stranger</ins>
There is absolutely no way to determine if somebody is being facetious or serious over the Internet without further context. (Use a damn /s ffs)
Who could be serious saying that ??? (I don’t think Donald is posting here onlemmy)
Let’s call it the gulf of middle earth
Nope, it’s the Gulf of America. He said so. Now quit your anti-US retorics lest you be deported.
Is this one of those weird maps with the equator going through Florida?
Gondor is going to need a lot more aid to move that gulf to the middle…
Only if marlago is designated americas rectum.
Palm Beach is full of [rich] assholes so I would say this tracks.
Urectum
Damn near killed em.
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.
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.
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.
Holy crap, just shoot me out a cannon, I’ll get there sooner or die, either is preferable
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.
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
Maps measure in miles AND kilometers here you have no excuse
Its all beans mate
Edit: about 350,000,000 wide
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.
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
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.
I mean I did think road trips were feasible before looking them up not to get dragged into the idea too early, but even then I didn’t think it would be a day. In my mind it was like a week at least.
Or just save being put in an ICE facility and go visit Canada and not be put in an ICE facility.
Edit typo
In America, 100 years is a long time
In Europe, 100 miles is a long distanceTf is a mile, bruv? Don’t come in 'ere with these nonsensical made up freedom units
Miles originated in Britain, so talk to them about their made-up nonsense.
At least they were eventually willing to give up the imperial system. I still don’t understand why Americans never got on board with metric; it’s so much easier.
Just watched a video which explains a few things.
Time zones start in UK because of some decent reasoning. France was also a contender for where timezones start for the same kinds of reasoning but conceded it in agreement that UK adopts the new metric system they created
deleted by creator
Yeah, 'Muricans be like “B-but… the Brits…”
Like, yeah. They moved on. They evolved, changed their ways. USians hanging on to legacy units
If I remember my conversions right then a mile is 5280 kilometers. I hope that helps explain why Europeans would fear such a distance!
Tf. Why would anyone have a unit for that
“A benpu is 327 meters!”
…wait a minute… am I being made a fool of? Can’t tell, cuz I don’t comprehend dumb units. I’d legit buy that as a real thing, given how stupid those tend to be
A US customary mile is 5280 US customary feet. 1 US customary foot is 12 US customary inches. 1 US customary inch is 25.4mm. So a US customary mile is 1609344mm, exactly. It derives from the roman “mille passus”, literally 1000 paces, where a pace is the distance between two impacts of the left (or right) foot of a Roman soldier on the march. Quite a few other cultures used a “mile” of some sort even after the fall of Rome, for example the old British imperial mile was 1760 British imperial yards, one British imperial yard predated the definition of the meter but was most precisely measured to be 0.914398415m, so the British imperial mile was 1609341.21mm. Other culture’s miles varied even more than this.
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.
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.
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.
You have no right to tell me what my butt does or doesn’t do.
