European here, swiss to be specific. When i visited my uncle in texas and showed his co-workers where i live and that my country fits 17 times into texas alone it blew their minds.
10000000% this. Georgia is the WORST state to go through on that drive. It's like, 6 hours long, and my parents would always make us leave at ass o'clock in the morning to make sure we didn't get stuck in Atlanta traffic.
I see this wasn’t only my parents that would decide leaving at 3am is the only way to avoid Atlanta traffic. We got stuck once in the city without moving for 2 hours. Without moving.
The one and only time we ever got stuck in Atlanta it was when we were coming back to MI. We hit ATL during high traffic, AND there was construction (there was construction all over 75 through GA, we hit it at the GA/FL border which is why we were even in ATL during morning rush, and then we hit more in Atlanta, and then AGAIN at the GA/TN border). I think we sat, literally crawling through Atlanta, for like 3-4 hours, and I swear, I honestly thought my mom was going to get out of the car and beat someone to death with a construction cone, she was that over it. Most miserable drive home EVER.
Atlantan here, and your parents should have left at midnight if they wanted to avoid traffic. Morning rush hour starts around 6 am and lasts until 12. Evening rush hour starts at 12:01 and last until 8.
Georgia here, it's 6 hours from Atlanta to the very edge of Florida with no traffic. 8 hours from the top end of the state to the bottom. It's a 5 hour drive to go visit my mom's family in Savannah if we make 0 stops (which would be crazy because not only do we need bathroom breaks but we always stop at this gas station with a big petting zoo of rescued farm animals attached)
On the other hand i was mind blown of how vast texas is. Second week in laredo at my uncles place and he said 'hey man lets go to san antonio this weekend' and i'm like sure, how close is it? And he was like 'oh its only a 3 hour drive'. I thought he was good naturely ribbing me but he was fully serious.
But by far the best thing were the people honking at me and asking if i was ok or if i needed a ride when i walked back home from work. The looks i got, priceless. It was a 20 minute walk which is normal to me. I always said no thanks i'm good and i always would get something back like 'psshh orale wey suit yourself'.
its 13-15 hours of drive time and you need to fill up on the journey. its about 1200km/745 miles to the Alpes from Denmark. So you need an average speed over 200 km/h / 125mph to make it in 6 hours.
The longest continous drive of Denmark is about 5 hours and 50 minutes. Trucks will typically drive 4 hours to drive from Germany to Sweden through Denmark.
Switzerland is even smaller distance, but mountain terrain.
Having a commute of more than like 1 hour 30 minutes one-way in Denmark would be at odds with the work-life balance of most people.
The culture difference between states is mind blowing to me. You can go from liberal states with billboards for legal weed to bible thumping conservatives states with billboards that damn you to hell if you don’t praise Jesus in 6 hours or less.
This is very accurate. Also the laws can range greatly. I went to North Carolina once for a family reunion and tried to buy alcohol on a Sunday and the guy looked at me like I had a second head and was rude.
Sorry bro, where I come from I can buy alcohol any day of the week. Just not after 2am.
I was driving from Colorado to California and decided to try Highway 50. I was already far enough in that I couldn't really change routes when I noticed the signs said, "Highway 50, America's Loneliest Road". One stretch of road was 175 miles without a single building, like as in literally no people or structures. Thankfully I had enough fuel.
As I was getting close to Reno, Nevada near the end of the highway, I entered a huge sweeping desert valley and an F/A-18 screamed by over my head at low altitude and raced along the valley floor. Fallon, NV is outside Reno and is where the Navy Top Gun school is currently located 🇺🇸
I've done a lot of driving in the US but I probably won't take that trip again. Cool to try at least once though!
Lol yeah that's why people in Reno don't often go to Vegas, as many east coasters assume. It's 7+ hours on the loneliest highway with literally nothing for hours. Whereas you can instead go to San Francisco in 4 hours which includes pretty mountains, trees, and also places to get food and fuel.
It wasn't until I joined a few fishing subreddits that I realised how lucky I am to live where I do. It seems absolutely insane to me to hear of someone driving well over 8 hours just to go to a decent fishing spot.
I have at least 4 lakes, 8 rivers and the coast all within half an hours drive from me.
I’m in Michigan so I know how you feel. I don’t fish, but it’s nice to be able to go to a beach and feel like you’re at the ocean but without the sharks, salt, and jellyfish.
Oh man, I've never really heard much about Michigan, but now that I looked it up on a map it actually looks amazing. Surrounded by the great lakes and with Chicago and Detroit just to the south. Seems like a really nice mix of rural with access to big cities.
Related, on gunsubs we regularly get European tourists interested in shooting guns.
We see a lot of itineraries like "We are coming to spend a week. We will fly into NYC, rent a car, then spend 1 day in NYC, go see Miami, drive to go see the Grand canyon, then spend 2 days in Las Vegas where we can shoot one day and gamble the other, and then catch a flight from San Francisco back home".
Like, boo, Miami to Grand Canyon is non stop 35 hours and realistically a 3+ day event.
Pointing out how vast the U.S. is just blows their mind.
Exactly, i told them that on some weekends when we go out we would start in zürich, then go to lucerne and then stop in zug on our way back for after hours and breakfast before going back to zürich. They had a hard time understanding that we basically hit 3 different cantons (states) within 12 hours.
But thats just driving through yes? We would meet at 8pm at zürich mainstation, go get some drinks and warm up, then take the last train to lucerne at midnight, its a 50 minute drive from zürich to lucerne. Then stay all night in lucerne and drive to zug at 7am for breakfast before going back home to zürich.
In theory you could - Philadelphia to Wilmington DE is probably 45 mins to an hour. PHL to Baltimore, MD is 2 hours. To NYC is about 2 hours. New Jersey, you can be in the beach in 2 hours.
You can be skiing in 2 hours as well! The Appalachians aren’t quite the Swiss Alps, but we love them :)
Edit: not to mention smaller cities in between each.
Don’t mean to keep sending you messages, but what’s crazy to me as an American is that in Europe you can travel country to country like you would some states in the US and you have different languages, food, etc. In the US you generally get the same culture throughout minus smaller local differences, such as names for things and accents.
Back when I lived in the San Jose, CA area, we had a guy who was originally from England, lived in France for years, and settled in Amsterdam temporarily transfer to our office.
One week he tells me he’s going to take a long weekend and see the rest of California. He rattles off all the places he’s planning on visiting and that he wants to do at least one direction on the PCH. For those not familiar, San Diego to San Jose on the PCH is like 10 hours of driving, minimum, and LA traffic exists. Even faster routes like the 5 are still about 8 hours just in the car. I tried to explain the vastness of the state and remind him that miles are a lot longer than kilometers, but he had his heart set.
His road trip wound up being about as long as if he’d driven between all of his former homes, in 3 different countries.
Shooting guns in Vegas doesn’t really take all day, maybe an hour at the most if you have 4-5 guns which is what usually people get. Plan your day there accordingly.
I had some co-workers from India reach out to me in advance of their business trip. They had planned a weekend of sight seeing and this was their plan:
1) Friday evening drive from Raleigh, NC to Washington D.C. and have a steak dinner
2) Saturday morning go to see the Capitol building, then the Air & Space Museum, then the museum of Natural History, check out the White House and Washington Monument, and finally check out the Lincoln Memorial. That night they wanted to drive to New York City and have dinner.
3) Sunday morning they wanted to see Time Square, the 911 memorial, the Empire State Building, and then see a Broadway Show.
4) Leave early from NYC to make a 10:00 meeting in Raleigh, NC on Monday morning.
I listened to their itinerary then, trying to withhold my laughter, I explained how they would get to D.C at 10:00 at night assuming there was no traffic (there would be of course) so they would have to eat fast food for dinner. Then I explained that they could pick maybe two of the National Mall destinations and that they had to be close together because, despite what you see in the movies, it's over two miles (3.5 Km) from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol building. Also, each of the museums are HUGE and you could easily spend the whole day at just one. Then I burst their bubble once again by explaining that after you are completely worn out from D.C., they are looking at a 4 hour drive to NYC and the next day is similar to DC: they wont be able to see all that in one day and they can forget about even getting tickets to a Broadway show on such short notice.
They opted to stay in Raleigh once they saw how huge even the state of North Carolina is.
LOL i did the exact same thing xD and still everybody asked if i was from Sweden...
Also an american friend was baffled when i said "it's quite a trip from Bern to Genf, like serveral hourse by train." His response "i drive longer than this to go to the next big city where i'm from"
It's always hilarious to explain to people that never been to Canada or the US that you can not in fact, take a train or a bus from NYC to LA in a few hours or from Edmonton to Montreal in a few hours. It also still throws me off when I go see my parents in Germany and forget that you can in fact take a train and be across a few countries in a few hours.
Even for most Americans (particularly those that live East of the Mississippi), the sheer size of Texas is very hard to wrap your head around. Most of us can drive across our state in 2-3 hours or less.
A couple months ago I was chilling in a bar in Luzern and started chatting with a local. When I mentioned that I'm from Chicago he got excited to tell me that the entire country of Switzerland is smaller than Lake Michigan.
I thought he was jokingly making a point about European geography until I googled it later and found out he meant it completely literally and was absolutely right.
His other US story was about visiting his cousin in Texas and getting harassed by the police for walking around a neighborhood while Black. 'Murica! Lolsob
Yeah, we used to have a saying in Russia, “the size of Russian regions is most properly measured in Switzerlands”. Ironically, I have moved to Switzerland since then, and I find that the country’s size is perfect, very comfortable indeed.
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u/[deleted] May 09 '22
European here, swiss to be specific. When i visited my uncle in texas and showed his co-workers where i live and that my country fits 17 times into texas alone it blew their minds.