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Comment by dtgriscom | Hacker News Reader

I grew up on the US East Coast. When I moved to the West Coast for a summer, I found that my normally good navigational skills were totally scrambled, because the ocean was in the wrong direction.

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Lived in the Bay Area and got sent to Cocoa Beach, FL for a work trip.

Didn’t care to get out much., but figured I’d stroll to the beach to watch the sunset.

Got about halfway there before figuring out where I’d gone wrong.

One not only can watch the sun rise and set over the ocean in a single day in Florida, I've done so.

You get used to it, and honestly, it's nice in its own way. Having the sun at your back warming you on a coolish night while staring at the horizon is pretty peaceful.

Plus, I'd rather watch the sunset on the Indian River than to watch it over the Gulf, because of all the awful people who crowd the beaches of the other side of the state.

How did you get halfway there If you were walking in the wrong direction?

I was trying to orient myself coming out of the subway in the heart of downtown Chicago, and I said "ah, the lake is over there, so that's east." My companion was surprised that that was the landmark on which I seized, but I grew up in a rural area in which I could never develop a sense of direction, and felt huge relief when I moved to Chicago and there were two landmarks (the, ahem, Sears tower and the lake) that could be used for navigation almost anywhere in the city.

Once, when I moved for a while from the northern to the southern hemisphere, my time-estimating skills were quite disturbed because the sun traveled from right to left.

> I found that my normally good navigational skills were totally scrambled, because the ocean was in the wrong direction.

I experienced this recently while staying on the North side of Cyprus. If I headed east or west the sea was on the wrong side, compared with where it is at home (south coast of UK). I also get confused when I'm in the southern hemisphere, and the Sun goes across the sky the wrong way, and shadows lengthen on the wrong side of objects.

I had something related in Montreal. Bewildered until I realised the paper tourist map was rotated clockwise by around 60°. North was definitely not where it should have been.

Ronda in Spain is the only place I've felt agoraphobic. There are mountains on the horizon and it felt like they were an unsettlingly long way away.

I'm familiar with what you mean - whenever I travel it takes 2-3 days for my internal compass to acclimate to wherever I am.

I grew up on the West Coast and feel the same when I go to the East Coast. :)

It gets even worse on islands.

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