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My wife and I drove from North Carolina, to Wisconsin, to South Dakota, and back to North Carolina again as a cross country road trip. We drove over four thousand miles.
It was fucking bizarre.
There comes a point where your mind can barely conceive that people are still speaking the same language. I think your monkey brain must assume that once you’re far enough away from home, then surely everything and everyone must be a foreigner.
And for sure, there are parts of the United States that seem to be literally foreign to one another, and there are parts of the Midwest that are such titanically empty swathes of corn fields and wind turbines that it seems like one has dropped into a parallel dimension.
But there’s something kind of awesome, in the awe-inspiring sense of the word, that it’s all one big country, one big union of people who have (more or less) decided to engage in one big human project all together.
I think everyone should have a chance to make such a journey. It really crams the concept of the scale of this country into your consciousness in a way that can’t be done without actually covering the mileage, on the ground, for yourself.
If you’re originally from the Midwest you get the opposite experience:
There are places that you can’t tell what town you’re in, for miles and miles, because buildings are everywhere, and there are no cornfields or empty areas to separate cities. Cities are just allowed to grow into each other in some places.
Road trips were always the thing that made me appreciate America for what it is. If my only experience of America was the one place I lived, I probably wouldn’t like America as much as I do.
I’m soooo interested in driving from Florida to Alaska. I might do it next year.
As a Floridian, people from the Pacific Northwest might as well be foreigners to me. They are just very different from what I’m used to interacting with. They’re usually chill, accepting, quite socially conscious, into peculiar hobbies, and wear a lot of black. That’s uncommon here.
I once made a trip out west (I live near the East Coast) towards Yellowstone National Park. Some of the sights I saw were almost surreal.
There’s dozens of us out in the fields, dozens of us!
If you’re in Los Angeles, you may not have left your county yet
I’m pretty sure my father has only ever been in one state over, and that’s to visit Vegas. I’ve been to multiple countries on multiple continents, and I’ll continue traveling the world
How brave of you.
And yet high-speed rail is a foreign concept
Alien might be a better word, but foreign is very accurate
I’d kill for public transport. No kidding, point me in a direction.
(Jk)
Start by linking a city in Mexico with a smaller city in the US. The cities will prosper and other cities want to be connected.
Don’t forget that local public transport is needed or you need parking space for many cheap rental cars next to the stations until self-driving cars are available.
That’s actually brilliant.
e: Is Canada already doing this? Iisn’t there public transport between Windsor and Detroit? I’m going to look into that.
Please drop a quick note about your results.
I would expect that the high in high-speed rail is necessary. Otherwise it’s not a connection of economically distinct zones. Additionally the economies are more similar so that there are fewer reasons for travel.
Tijuana - San Diego
In LA you have just completed your commute to and from work on a tuesday
Baps are Shite way too big for your sausage and drier than all hell when you take a bite and get nothing but bread.
Morning rolls ftw.
I will die on this hill
Shit if you’re in Los Angeles, you could spend 4 hours just to move 10 feet.
New York City has entered the chat.
No one drives in New York. There’s too much traffic.
Thanks, Yogi. I’ll Berra that in mind
Hawaii checking in. If a highway shuts down, book a hotel on the side you’re on.
Need some more trains.
there is traffic ahead of us
Boston seemed like that too, when I was there, and I’m still wondering why anyone who lives there bothered to have a car. On the outskirts, yeah, but if you’ve got business in the heart of Boston specifically, it seems from experience you should just walk.
The trains are so fucked that my 7 mile 30 minute bike commute is 55 minutes by train. It’s a straight line with one change.
Driving would be 30-50 aggravating minutes and $450 for a parking space.
Boston is a regional city that bizarrely believes itself to be a major international metropolis. The levels of journey times and cost of living are up to par anyway.
if the MBTA ever gets its shit together, cars could disappear entirely in the city
don’t hold your breath for that one
if the MBTA ever gets its shit together…
Might be better to plan for transporter technology than that, more plausible at least.
You’re talking about a space that is probably less than 15 square miles. Outside of that driving is a lot less painful.
only twice?
Yeah, the accent will change in the time it takes to get to the next village.
Europeans think 100 miles is a long way, Americans think 100 years is a long time
“We’ve redecorated this building to how it looked over 50 years ago!”
Favourite fuckin comedian
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I watch a lot of British panel shows and am slowly starting to differentiate the accents. I can recognize some of them, but I couldn’t tell you where any of them are from.
If I’m not paying attention, they all just sound “generic British” to me.
Jimmy Carr’s laugh should have its own accent because wtf is that!
Remember how old 8-bit games would try to synthesize sounds because they couldn’t just use recordings?
That’s about how natural his laugh sounds.
I just watched a similar segment on Taskmaster doing some regional American accents, everyone kind of defaulted to Texas
And we Americans can’t comprehend how every little metro area has its own distinct accent.
I once drove for 10 hours in the UK and was still in the same town! That magic roundabout is very confusing.
Pff in Australia I can travel over 2000km in a straight line and never leave my state, and it’s not even the biggest.
Now we need somebody from Siberia to tell us how they can drive for 5000km and never leave their federal subject (I had to look that up, it’s what the different regions of Russia are called)
I’m not Siberian, but from what I’ve gathered from the talks of people who lived there, is that people in far east Russia have a weird sense of time and distance. You might be in in the middle of fuck nowhere with the closest living person being like a 100km away from you, but when you call them with some any dumb questions like “Hey do you happen to have a bottle opener?” they respond with “Sure, I’ll be there shortly” and then they do indeed arrive… in 4 hours. It’s as if they don’t have places to be, and it’s totally okay for them to spend an entire day driving to a shop or to friend to lend them a screwdriver. It’s especially baffling to people who lived their entire lives within ~40km Moscow’s ring road and they hear stuff like “Minsk? Sure, that’s like a hand’s reach away - only 720 kilometers. I’ll drop by on the weekend”.
You can drive for four hours and still be on I-5 in LA.
You can drive for 30 hours and still be on the same highway in the same state in Australia.
Damn, I thought the 22 hours to cross Ontario was long.
The thing is, Australia is basically the same size as America (minus Alaska), but only has 6 states and one state-sized territory. 7 compared to 48 means the time taken to travel across one state is much greater.
Canada is obviously a lot bigger than Australia, but it also has a lot more provinces/territories. 13, which is almost double. And while it’s a lot bigger, it’s nowhere near double the area. 30% extra land for 85% extra provinces, to be precise.
Yeah, define ‘driving’ lol
Nothing like driving for 10 hours and still not leaving California or Texas!
Drive for like 200 hours and never leave Hawaii
Grew up in South Texas. Going to visit family in Missouri, we would start driving at 5 in the morning, only braking for food and bathrooms, and still have to stop for the night at the Arkansas border.
Here’s a crazy alternative: railway.
Oh right. You guys don’t have that.
We’re trying, it just keeps getting fucked by corruption and NIMBYs. Like everything else in this cursed state.
Even with rails it can be slow ass fuck. I took the train from LA Union station to Seattle and that took I want to say a day and a half. Standard stop and go maybe it couldve been faster if ot was more direct but even then at most youd probably only shave off maybe 4 hours at max. Its an 18 hr drive.
So take a train at night and get some sleep? That’s usually how rest of the world deals with long distance travel. Plus, not driving for 18 hours sounds a much better alternative in any scenario.
Dude I left at fucking 8 in the morning from LA and didnt get to seattle till like 5 in the afternoon the nex day. The problem for me though is that I had nothing to focus on, I dont have such problems driving. Also the train only left in the morning, so yeah. 34 hour trip is fucking horrible.
Nah. Just take like 4 Ambien and sleep for that entire 34 hour train ride.
I drove Seattle to LA over the summer. Did it over two days. It wasn’t pleasant per se. But I got to sleep in a real bed. Took an impromptu trip to San Jose (Winchester house). Found some good taco trucks. And still got there in half the time a train would. The train just doesn’t make sense for us, not on long trips at least.
Yeah without some major improvements they just trains are only viable for say Redlands to LA. People seem to forget just how fucken big the US is, California alone is larger the Britain FFS.
Also I wish I could take sleeping pills, but between the Autism and my bodies resistences they just make me pissy.
You only slow down for food and bathrroms>
What about red lights?
Traffic?
Nope, everyone in Texas drives like we’re playing Burnout: Revenge
For people wondering, this is true. When you cross the Texas border they automatically attach a small device to your car that allows you to survive any wreck and reset your car to being brand-new!
or at the very least, people here drive like they think this is true.
I didn’t wanna say, but I’ve been to Dallas. You have too many lanes to be coming into mine.
Except for the construction areas of 35, where five lanes will suddenly become two
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only braking for food and bathrooms
only breaking for food and bathrooms
bathrroms> (Because I can’t spell either)
