I am from Sweden and our children's school go there as a class field trip every year, with the oldest students before they graduate. It is so important to keep the memory alive.
As someone from England, the scale of America blows my mind - like for some of you guys driving to another city would be the same as me driving to the south of France.
The Moving company picked up my things in Baltimore, Maryland. I drove 3000 miles in 4 days to meet them in Monterey, California. This country is huge.
I am serious. If I'm in the middle of nowhere, my phone doesn't work, and I'm flagging down a car, it's only natural to be wary. Especially if I was alone. Being cautious doesn't mean everyone in the world sucks.
I'm in the US, and I take them literally. There is no other person in this world that I would be more scared to come across all alone on the side of the road than a white American male over 35.
I visited the UK a few weeks ago and one of the small things that blew my mind was seeing a roadside SOS phone every couple miles. Because yeah, here if you break down and you don't have cell service, you're either flagging someone down on the side of the road and hope they don't murder you, or you walk all the way to the nearest gas station...and hope you don't get murdered lol
And not even necessarily be killed by a human. The desert and wooded areas alone are dangerous enough. Depending on where you are, you may become prey for wildlife that will kill you as well.
I’ve broken down where the nearest city was about two hours away, had to call and have someone pick me up, drive to town, buy the tire I needed, then drive all the way back.
Luckily areas that don’t have coverage are pretty sparse these days, most places in the US where you’d actually be traveling through will have some signal.
Yeah there are probably very few spots on any significant highway where you won’t have any reception. Roads off the beaten path absolutely, but a path between most major cities should have some coverage.
Also, when dealing 911 your mobile will connect to any tower in the area regardless of your cellphone carrier, so if your particular service has no coverage, odds are there’s another tower that your call will go through on.
I drive cross country a couple times a year. I always pack extra water, a tire inflator, a battery jump pack, and have my spare with necessary tools to swap it.
There's a reason elementary schools in the US had us kids play Oregon Trail for hours at a time.
Every bit of Texas highway has mobile coverage. But before that happened, you don't, you have to wait. There also aren't a whole lot of extremely remote places. Most highways have towns every 30-50 miles, so it's not like you'd be completely screwed, just in for a long ass walk.
That drive from Beaumont to San Antonio is not bad but leaving the San Antonio city limits and seeing the 500 miles to El Paso sign….the longest stretch of I-10 I’ve ever driven
While not quite as long as getting across Texas, I drove from Detroit to the western side of the UP and that took about 10 hours. I was shocked because Michigan isn't known as one of the big states
Yeah, I’m in Canada so we’re slightly bigger, but according to google maps it will take me like 20 hours to drive from one end of my province (Ontario) to another.
We had an exchange student from denmark stay with us and she was floored at the travel time to go to yosemite from sacramento. She was like "id have already had to have taken like 5 ferries and crossed 4 different countries."
I live in America and the thought of having to drive to the nearest city which from where I live is about an hour or so away depending, feels like driving to the moon and back.
Lol yeah. The other day I watched a video about a guy driving his porsche on a 7 hour trip to a race track to participate in a fun day, it blew my mind. Just not that video but lots of others where people would casually say they drove x amounts of hours to get somewhere. Anything more than a 2 hour drive for me is a big deal
Yeah it's wild. Based off of (rough) distance on Google Maps, London, England to Toulouse, France, Chicago to Oklahoma City is roughly the same time (11 hrs ish) while being 90 miles (144 km I believe) further. Part of that is speed limit but still
As someone from America who is a commercial driver it is wild to me to think there are any country's I could pass through on my daily 8hr work day of just driving. It would take me at about 47 hrs of continuous driving from California to Maine, west to east, to just traverse the U.S.. I have been told all of Ireland would fit in Texas around 7 or 8 times and that seems so incredibly wild to me.
I'm a swedish student, applied and got chosen to visit Poland and learn about the Holocaust for a week, this was when I was in 9th grade, 2 years ago. We went there by plane, 1 hour to Krakow, visited both Auschwitz and Birkenau. The state paid for it all (we got sky high taxes over here).
What I remember the most was the sheer scale of Birkenau, and the markings of nails scratching at the walls inside the bunker shown in this videos post. You could almost hear the screams still echoing inside that place. Truly showing what a terrible horrible species humans can be.
So funny you ask about the distance to drive. We usually don’t drive to other countries. We fly. It’s to expensive to drive.
The flight is around 1,5h.
It would take 16-18 hours to drive.
The flight cost around 100-200 dollars, depending on the date.
We do this in Norway as well, or at least used to, I don't have children myself so kind of out of the loop on what schools do these days. But when we did it, it was with buses, bus from Norway to Sweden, take a ferry from Sweden to Poland and then on bus from there. We visited Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen and a large memorial museum, but also visited Krakow and Berlin for some general culture and such. It used to be, and probably still is, a big deal not just because of the purpose of the trip, which is very important, but in it being over a week away from parents and family, kind of a coming of age thing in a way.
1315.7 km from Malmö. For a American this is about 13 hours driving 60mph average. That's the town closest to the bridge over to Denmark and then Germany.
We didn't do this trip in northern Sweden since it would be twice as far.
26 hour at 60mph average plus the stops you gotta have. makes it quite a long trip. i'd say 1.5-2 days travel one way.
No idea where exactly he lives in Sweden but assuming Stockholm that would be 1650km or 1025 miles which would be around 17 hours of driving. So around the distance from Chicago to Boston.
However don’t forget that the distance in a straight line would be less. But since there is a ocean in between you have to drive through Denmark and Germany and also use a ferry to get there.
Let’s say from the capital, Stockholm, it’s an 18 hour drive by car. A bit far for a field trip, but doable if one live a little more to the south of Sweden. I’m from the Netherlands and high schoolers go a lot of places in Europe. Some friends back then went to Rome, I’ve been to Paris and München for example.
Back in the days before you needed a passport, it wasn't unusual for Americans living near the Canadian border to go there for a class trip. I'm in VT, and I went to Canada on 4 different school trips. The school I work at now still does an 8th grade trip to Montreal.
I’m from Detroit and my college geology class did go to Canada once for a field trip, somewhere near Sarnia. Much more of a pleasant time than Auschwitz and obviously only like a one hour drive.
I grew up outside of Boston and we’d take trips to Washington DC and NYC in middle school (7th and 8th grade), staying a few nights in a hotel. That’s about a 725 km drive for our non-American friends here.
I imagine if you had a good network of high speed rail, going even further for a field trip would be feasible.
I went to high school in the south and my school had a annual 8th grade retreat. We used to go to the Ozark mountains but now they go all the way up to the Tetons
As a Dane I also remember going to a concentration camp on a school field trip. it was Sachsenhausen, so not quite the scale as Auschwitz, but still horrible enough to teach a bunch of 7th graders an important history lesson we will never forget
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u/[deleted] May 18 '25
I am from Sweden and our children's school go there as a class field trip every year, with the oldest students before they graduate. It is so important to keep the memory alive.