Things you were shockingly old when you learned

jokes are a flat circle

That this was almost a thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw6eDkczp00

Bark Bent

philly is like only an hour and a half from nyc. like, they practically touch. ok, i exaggerate there. they don't wanna touch, and nobody wants to touch them. har har har.

yeah growing up in IL it threw me for a loop once I realized how close all the northeastern cities are to each other. I remember putting in different locations' driving directions to NYC shortly after googlemaps et al became a thing and going "no, that can't be right!".

likewise how close European countries are to each other compared to North America

how many countries there are within a day's drive/ferry/chunnel of each other is prob better way to put it

My father (a St. Louisan) was surprised to find out how close Washington is to New York, and asked why I don't go there every weekend.

Um.

xp. I've definitely recounted how my family drove from Glasgow to Genoa in 36 hours with a night's sleep in a hotel in France to North American people before and surprised them

Those were the days.

I missed a couple of games in the 1994 World Cup due to that drive but being in Rome for the semi-final and final was a very interesting experience for a ten year old

Xxp Contrariwise, western-US distances make no sense to this easterner.

A journey from DC to, say, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, or even Kansas City is basically comprehensible. You look out the window and see farms, fields, mountains, rivers. Basically recognizable landscapes.

Travel to Nevada or California and you traverse the surface of the motherfucking MOON. Hundreds of square miles of... rocks.

That's already weird.

Then you hear about western wildfires destroying 10,000 acres and... Three buildings. It's just an entirely different sort of space.

One time I idly thought I would take a trip to the West Coast to visit friends in Portland, Eugene, and San Francisco. At first glance it looks doable as a road trip, in the way a Richmond to Philly trip might be. Heck, why not just rent a car and...

omg holy shitsnacks it is nine. hundred. muthaflippin. miles. No thanks, I will take an airplane.

yeah I'm in north-central AZ and ppl will be like hey I'm gonna be in Denver, you should drive over and meet up. It's just the next state over, after all.
It's a friggin 12 hour drive!
My birthday is day after memorial day so I took that whole week off and thought I might shoot over to White Sands NM for a couple nights. Again, just the next state over, and White Sands is in the western part of that state. 8 hour drive!

but then again, my conception of long drives is based on starting in Chicago, which means hours and hours of mind-numbingly dull scenario before any hope of seeing something different. So a 6 hour drive out in that region is psychologically/morale-y equivalent to a 3 hour drive out West.

I get thinking Portland and Eugene would be doable on a road trip, but think in terms of US coastline! From Oregon to San Francisco is further than NYC to South Carolina, at least as far as I can surmise by squinting at a map.

yeah northern CA is surprisingly long. I think of San Francisco as being northern CA, just a stone's throw from OR. I have a friend in Arcata, was gonna go up and see him. Arcata is 5 hours north of San Francisco!

California is a whole country.

(Corny reference, I know, but) Bill Bryson writes about how meticulously a British person will plan a journey of a distance that an American person would happily drive to get a taco.

Perhaps one thing we are learning is that the US is kinda big and mostly empty.

I'll never forget driving the Uhaul from Boston to Austin 20 years ago. At first I was like woohoo I'm just cruising through these states, and then each state got bigger and bigger, and pretty soon it was how the fuck long have I been driving through Tennessee for?

the worst thing to me about living in Seattle as an erstwhile Northeast Regional rider is that the only place to take the train to is Portland (though I haven't yet tried vacationing at any of the intermediate station stops on the Cascades; I even think I still know people in Olympia)

moodles is correct and some of the states that look small (like Maryland or, as you note, Tennessee) can be interminable. If I drive to the beach or toward New York it seems I spend like 83% of the time in Maryland. It's like how February is shortest in days but seems like twice as long as other months.

you gotta drive through a lot of Maryland farmland to get to the Delaware shore.

the worst thing to me about living in Seattle as an erstwhile Northeast Regional rider is that the only place to take the train to is Portland (though I haven't yet tried vacationing at any of the intermediate station stops on the Cascades; I even think I still know people in Olympia)

― silby, Wednesday, April 22, 2020 12:00 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

you can take the train to Vancouver in a few hours

the worst thing to me about living in Seattle as an erstwhile Northeast Regional rider is that the only place to take the train to is Portland

and Eugene and Vancouver and the other Vancouver and Bellingham and Tukwila and Salem and Centralia etc etc

also tbf you can go to Chicago

xpost

I've heard ppl express desire to do the Empire Builder train, Chicago to Seattle. Don't see the appeal. 1/2 the journey would be monotonous prairie. Guess that's preferable to the Chicago-Denver train journey my friend and her kid went on recently for leisure; hey let's take a train 1000 miles and stop just when the scenery starts to get good.

yes yes but like. It's not the same as living in DC and popping up to New York or even Boston on something very nearly like a whim.

I want to take the Empire Builder to Chicago sometime but I just like being on trains. The problem is you chew up so much of your time just on the traveling.

Really going to consider not getting on a plane ever again except for emergencies after covid though.

Bellingham is cool

1/2 the journey would be monotonous prairie

you're allowed to read a book and listen to music as well as looking out the window

I can do that at home, for free tho!

I've just done so many long drives starting from IL that I never need to see any of those prairie states ever again. Let's get rid of them.

Trains have bars

That is part of why trains are great.

You can walk around and go sit someplace else. Trains>planes, if you have time

My own vexingly interminable drive is Nebraska across I-80. Once you get past Lincoln, and until you’re almost to Denver once you’re actually in Colorado, it just... keeps going. The western part has some rocks, I guess.

The popularly cited example of a reasonable free speech restriction on "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre" comes from a court decision suppressing a socialist's right to peacefully distribute pamphlets that opposed the draft in WW1, a decision that was since overturned: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/

and Eugene and Vancouver and the other Vancouver and Bellingham and Tukwila and Salem and Centralia etc etc

Honest q: with the exception of the Canadian Vancouver, why would you go to any of these towns if you already live in seattle? iirc the reason you leave town in the PNW is to go to the coast, forest, or mountains. I might have accepted Astoria; Bend is hella creepy imo.

Ah I seemed to have missed you were talking strictly about train stops

I would still strongly recommend silby not pay money to take the train to Eugene

I would routinely drive 10 hours across Michigan to visit my girlfriend while we were in college; later we drove from to DC and it was 10 hours in Michigan the first day, and 10 through MI/OH/PA/MD/VA the second one.

When we lived in WA we would drive to MI every other summer; it was 2000 miles and took 3 days and the biggest city we went through was about 110,000 people. The western US is HUGE and EMPTY and North Dakota in particular can fuck right off.

I have some friends in Saskatchewan who have tried to talk me into driving to visit them

I'm pretty sure once I were to get past Minneapolis, the only city of note is Fargo, and then eight hours of pretty much nothing

huh, I just learned there's a town in North Dakota along the Canada border that is literally called "Portal" with "North Portal" on the other side in Canada

Nebraska is the fucking worst. Why so long east to west? Why so much stench of cow shit? Why such shitty dining options?

then you finally get to Colorado and surprise surprise the eastern 3rd of the state is just Western Nebraska

Off topic:

I just learned that the renowned baseball player Gary Carter coined the term "F-bomb" in 1988. I'm kind of intrigued by celebrity coinages, another example being Justin Timberlake and "wardrobe malfunction."

I have some friends in Saskatchewan who have tried to talk me into driving to visit them

I'm pretty sure once I were to get past Minneapolis, the only city of note is Fargo, and then eight hours of pretty much nothing

when i lived in minneapolis i was gonna drive up and see the (first) jets in their final season in winnipeg -- it's right next door, right? -- until it occurred to me that eight hours each way through the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter wasn't a great idea

One time I idly thought I would take a trip to the West Coast to visit friends in Portland, Eugene, and San Francisco. At first glance it looks doable as a road trip, in the way a Richmond to Philly trip might be. Heck, why not just rent a car and...

omg holy shitsnacks it is nine. hundred. muthaflippin. miles. No thanks, I will take an airplane.

― stone cold jane austen (Ye Mad Puffin), Wednesday, 22 April 2020 18:21 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

did this, and on to seattle

lovely spin

when i lived in minneapolis i was gonna drive up and see the (first) jets in their final season in winnipeg -- it's right next door, right? -- until it occurred to me that eight hours each way through the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter wasn't a great idea

Ha, I once considered driving up to Thunder Bay so I could legally drink beer before I turned 21.

Even at 20½ years old, it didn't seem like it would be worth the effort.

sixmonths none the pitcher

Once you get past Brainerd, most of the drive to Winnipeg is pretty scenic!

Oops, but that assumes you're going through the woods and lakes and not through the plains, nevermind

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