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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Brilliant article. The same is very much true of distance. I'm British, and I've always thought of 100 miles as a long way because I grew up in a (relatively) tiny place. 600 miles away was the other end of my country. That was a really long way to me. Meeting an Australian colleague of my father who was happy to do a 600 mile round trip for a day out was a revelation. How far away something 'close' is very much depends on your frame of reference.

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In Europe 100 km is a long distance. In USA/Australia 100 years is a long time.

As a Canadian, it's always fun when we get European friends and family who come to Toronto and discuss going to Montreal or New York for "the day."

Then you get to explain just how far apart everything is here :)

Of course, I'm making a bit of a caricature here, but I really have had friends and family say this before.

When I was in the military and stationed in Germany, I received orders for a base in California. I explained to my German friends that it was 3000 miles from my parents house (where I was going to spend some time on leave), or 5000 km. And I was going to drive that distance by myself.

They had a difficult time comprehending that, until I explained it was like driving to Munich and back ... five times in a row. Then they got it. And were stunned that I would and could do something like that.

I live in the western part of the US (Colorado) and 600 miles doesn't actually take that long to drive. I regularly drive to my parent's house - which is about 550 miles - in 8 hours. I'm essentially driving the speed limit the entire way with no slowdowns except for one or two gas/restroom breaks. I would imagine driving that distance in GB would involve a much lower average speed.

I have always assumed this is why distances in the US (reasonably far away from the coasts) are "not that far".

8 hours in a car is an eternity.

(I've regularly done a 5 hour drive for family visits and dislike that experience)

Judging by your road movies, most of those 600 miles you'd be driving in a straight line. In the Old Continent, roads are traced around old crop fields and other properties, so you need to pay full attention to the road the whole time.

Unless the roads are really really old. Those Romans sure knew how to build straight roads.

Yeah, at least in my part of the US, that's very true. The roads do curve a bit of course, but they're straight enough that you drive 55 - 80 mph (88 - 130 kph) for almost the whole trip. And a lot of the time, there are at least two lanes to pick from -- common courtesy is that slower cars stay in the right lane so that faster drivers can pass them.

8 hours.

That's a whole working day.

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