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Comment by cowboysauce | Hacker News Reader

Roughly 40% of the United States is public land and there are national parks larger than some European contries. Sure, it's not freedom to roam, but you still have access to significantly more public land living in the United States than you would living in the UK.

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This is where statistics can really blind you, a majority of that is out west. Major population centers are on the coast. So you would still need to burn jet fuel to get there in a reasonable time frame.

This may come as a surprise to you, but one of the coasts with several population centers is also out west.

The majority may be there, but there are still many scattered throughout the country.

FFS, there's a National Park in New York City: Gateway National Recreation Area. At least I hope it's still there: used to go mountain biking there a long time ago.

Most of my vacations in the last several years have been to do with state parks in the Southeastern US. We've been to several in Georgia, Alabama, and North and South Carolina. In a lot of these cases, we would stage at one park (or in some cases, not-a-park) for several days and go out to another place or park each day.

I've lived in Georgia for most of my 40 years, and most of these parks I had never heard of until we went there. I think almost every single one has been a really good experience. And it's very affordable for my family of 5. We don't have to go far. They're all a little bit different.

I've seen Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon, and other sites of note in the US. They are really neat, and can be worth the trip. But I'm pretty sure at this point that I'll never even see everything that my home state has to offer in my lifetime, so I'm pretty content to stick to reasonable driving distance.

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