1: Yes I'm from Europe and yes I know that the US is big and that domestic flights are like taking the (approved) bus for many of y'all, it just doesn't feel like something that "fits" today's climate, so to speak.
By train might even be longer, I don’t know if there’s a direct route between St. Louis and Charlotte. There’s a chance you’d have to go through Chicago.
Edit: I checked. You do have to go through Chicago, and Washington, DC as well making it about a 39 hour train journey. It’s also probably at least twice as expensive as flying.
I can’t fault him for flying.
In fact, there are only a handful of Micro Centers in the US. (I am very thankful that I live in Houston, which has one). Micro Center is the closest thing we have to a real-deal electronics store with people who know their shit.
Flying to Charlotte to check it out totally makes sense to me.
They also have an industrial automated 3D printer filament retrieval machine customers can use, so I was lucky to get to try that out!
I'm telling that to make people aware that travel-by-plane is not only a carbon-intensive way to travel, but also a privilege not everyone has.
Now that I live in Europe I do the same, but with trains - and it is a far more pleasant experience.
I've even just taken the train for a couple of days so that I could get some work done - nothing gets the neurons firing better than an 8 hour train-ride to Prague or an overnighter to Hamburg or Paris.
Its a pretty decent office environment too, if you book things right, or take a sleeper car. I know some folks who just take the train to work, not to get to work, on a regular basis. I absolutely love to be able to see the landscape scroll by while I wait for a build.. and have even had a TV set up in my terrestrial offices with such videos on in the background, although I confess that these days I really like those hour-long "walk through <city>" videos as a viable attention-boosting tool.
And, this being Europe, Internet access is not so bad - never had issues with my remote shells being terminated due to altitude limits or zoning issues. Beer spills, and the opening of the disco car, on the other hand ..
I'm from and based in Germany. I haven't been much in the US in the last 10 years for several reasons.
Just the therapeutic action of gazing across the landscape for a few hours, then returning to the book or laptop on the table in front of you can be rejuvenating in ways that sitting on the 405 for a few hours in the afternoon, isn't.