One thing that came as a culture shock for me is that I'm used to driving like 4 hours to see relatives. And this is usually several times a year. Then I heard from some Britons that they have rarely visit their relatives who are only like a hour drive away. Really messed me up the first time.
Years ago I bought a used drum set from eBay for my daughter's Christmas present. The eBay auction was pick up only.
No big deal. It was only three hours drive each way. I did it on a Saturday. Drove there, picked it up, then drove home. All done in less than seven hours.
And they say we should all just switch to electric bikes like in the Netherlands. I tried showing them a comparison of the states using a map but turns out "I am just being difficult"
Size of a country has zero impact on your daily commute.
Lol Ok. Guess everyone has to crowd together in comparatively tiny little cities. All this usable land outside the cities is now uninhabitable. Genius.
Let me guess, we will own nothing and be happy, right? Oh and don't forget about eating bugs!! Yum yum!
That's not how cities work. That's just how America decided to approach that problem.
To spell it out for you: your commute is always in your local area. The size of your country is not relevant to your local area. What is relevant, is density. Density though, has nothing to do with the size of your country. Unfortunately, you are about twice as dense as Hong Kong.
I worked on a session in the nearest big metro to my small Texas town of 200,000 - daily commute of 2 hours and 25 minutes to get there in the morning, then 2 hours 25 minutes home (closer to 4 hours to get home on traffic heavy days). Not really unheard of.
Then, a few months ago - took a vacation on the beach island of South Padre, Texas then had to rush to a client in north Texas that next day. 12 hours of driving, all without leaving the state.
UK drivers know nothing of the true road trip life.
I'd say the 2 1/2 hour commute is pretty unheard of. I've never heard of it before. That sounds like hell. My boss's is 90 mins and he's always complaining.
I used to have a 40 mile/65km commute one way. I hated it. Inevitably someone would wad their car up on the highway, closing three lanes down to one lane during rush hour, and it would rapidly become a 90-minute commute.
Boss should find a good podcast and learn to meditate. Driving is my zen, especially on long highway stretches. I guess it also depends largely on if there's a love of driving and what vehicle you're in.
Thankfully it was just for 1 artist and we were done in about 3 weeks.
As a temporary thing it's not that bad but it's also an extra 5 hours on your day. I've done 3.5 hrs for a client meeting but at that point that hour long meeting is all I'm getting done that day
Yeah, I do. Right after I got done doing it for work the singer in our band booked us at Trees. So I spent all that time driving back and forth, then drove out on Saturday with a car full of equipment.
It's not like it was a big deal and that's such a fun venue. I had a great time. I just can't think of it without remembering that drive haha.
I hope you had a place to store your equipment there so you didn't have to load and unload everyday at least. Doing that every day would have been my nightmare.
Losing nearly 5 hours of your life just driving is pretty crazy. I've done East Yorkshire to Cardiff and back in a day to collect something and that took the best part of 9 hours with good traffic. In bad traffic that could have easily been 13 and it's not that far.
I mean, this sounds just like a big city thing, not an American thing. I live in Paris and hour long commutes are common here too.
As European cities are close together though, this can lead to situations where travelling between cities is not what takes the most time. I once (about a year ago) travelled a Paris-London which took me about 5 hours from start to finish - the Eurostar takes only just over 2 hours. The rest was travelling from my home to Gare du Nord, from St. Pancras to my destination, and border checks before boarding at Gare du Nord (thank Brexit for that one).
I get that from other people in the US sometimes, too. I live in Los Angeles county, and when people come from other places to visit they often think they can see way more things in one day than is reasonably feasible. Santa Barbara and San Diego are like 200 miles apart and it's going to take 5 or 6 hours from one to the other. The Hollywood sign and Disneyland are 30+ miles apart and a good hour separate.
I would make the point (not necessarily for an hour's drive) that the roads are often more tiring to drive on in the UK -- that is, they're not as flat, wide or straight as freeways often are, so require more concentration. Driving for an hour along Welsh country lanes doesn't feel the same as hitting the freeway for an hour. Just my two cents/tuppence
Being from SoCal and having lived in the UK, let me explain:
In the UK many of the roads are quite literally conversions from horse drawn carriage paths. In some cases, a drunk wanker from Liverpool could draw a better line for a road than most roads connecting off many of the UK motorways (Especially in Wales or Scotland). Add in round abouts, hills, creeks, rivers and stupidly narrow bridges, it's difficult.
I'd sincerely rather drive the Grapevine through Mammoth into Yosemite Village with black ice warnings than try and drive myself from Maidenbower, West Sussex UK to Dundee, Scotland again tbh.
While living in the UK, I bought a Heritage pass and took off almost every weekend either by light rail or by car. When my wife came to visit though, we drove from my flat near Crawley to Scotland over a 3 day trip. We visited in order: Ashford, Broomfield (Leeds Castle), Rettondon, Chelmsford, Ipswitch, Cambridge, Nottingham, Leeds, Newcastle upon Tyne, Edinburgh, Perth and finally ending in Dundee where I have distant relatives.
In all my trips, driving through the hills of Yorkshire and Cumbria are the scariest, but getting to Scone Palace outside of Perth through snow was quite challenging.
Most of the non main roads are a result of the feudal farming system. The US differs because people could buy up large rectangles of land which fit nicely together. The farming in Europe was a piecemeal affair, and roads were built onto to that. The UK is a very London centric country. The further north you get the less that is spent on roads and transport.
Same experience when my wife and I went to Scotland to visit friends. We were in Glasgow and wanted to check out Edinburgh, less than an hour bus ride, for the day. They told us that we were crazy and that's a whole weekend trip.
We laughed pretty hard. A full hour drive is only half of a daily work commute in Toronto, on a good day.
I used to commute Edinburgh - Glasgow, and plenty of others do the same. It's also common for folk to do the trip just for an evening to go to a gig or something (a lot of tours will have their only Scottish date in Glasgow). I think your friends were probably meaning that you'd need more than a day to fully be able to see what Glasgow has to offer? If not, that seems really odd as it's a busy commuter route.
Nope, they were really saying that you can't see anything there unless you go for the whole weekend.
We walked around, checked out the castle, saw a lame touristy film about Nessy, sampled some incredible whisky and were home for dinner.
It was kinda the same with St Abbs. They said we had to leave Friday morning and leave Sunday evening (again from Glasgow) or we wouldn't get to do much. Now I'm not going to say the place isn't gorgeous, but what we did was hang out in a... cottage? I'm not sure what to rightly call it, but we hung out at someone's place, played board games, played cards, hung out by the bluffs, on the beach etc.
I don't disagree that it was a relaxing and fun weekend, but we didn't need to spend a full 2.5 days there to do what we did. They made it seem like if we lost even an hour the weekend was lost.
History. My grandfather bought it 70 years ago. It's an old school house... That he actually went to school in. He died it too.
Besides that, we still have family and generations of friends we still know and love in nearby.
It's located on an Unesco site on the bay de chaleur. It's not worth a lot either. Im pretty sure I'd be trading down if I bought another place. I doubt I'd find a spot that beautiful.
Anyway, the drive is stunning and it doesn't bother me.
I've got four different countries, with different languages and currencies, within a four hour drive from my house. I only drive if the road trip is the goal.
Here in Australia, during the 80's, 90's before widespread internet. There would be several European's who needed rescuing each year as they decided to try and walk between major cities, because it looks close on a map.
I remember one German guy who needed rescuing while trying to walk from Sydney to Adelaide...that's 1200km away...in a straight line.
I've also heard of Europeans planning vacations in the US, expecting to see New York, Florida, Texas, LA, etc. without realizing how much travel that is.
I met a foreign exchange student in Australia. I asked what they were planning to do for their break.
They'd recently taken up surfing, and couldn't decide if they wanted to surf the east, west, north, or south coast. So they had decided they would stay in Alice Springs, basically in the middle of all of them, and do day trips to each one.
I didn't have the heart to tell them that to get to the nearest ocean from there takes about two solid days of driving. Add another day to get to a beach with decent surf.
That's more like saying to catch a train from Miami to Puerto Rico. No one is gonna build all that train line over the ocean for hundreds and hundreds of miles 😆
Canada has a highway that goes between the most easterly and westerly points of the country. If you drove from end to end, stopping only for gas and drive through meals, it would take you about a week.
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.
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".
Traveling across the US is like switching to an alternate dimension where everything is pretty much the same, but a few things are off. Like, Congress is the same, but suddenly there are dunkin' donuts everywhere and the land is weirdly flat
People say ‘whenever’ instead of ‘when’ and I want to clock them for it.
eta: I’m specifically disparaging the southern US states here. They just flat-out use words wrong, and I can say that now that I’m too far away for them to kick my ass.
I can see why you've read it that way, but I'm quite sure they're saying that some people say a word slightly differently in another part of the USA and they're joking that it makes them angry.
It’s a minor niggle I was joking about with hyperbole, but it does bother me a bit because ‘when’ means a specific time and ‘whenever’ means any of multiple times. Their meaning isn’t interchangeable.
Like: ‘I talked to my dad when he was in town’ means I talked with him that last time he was in town, but ‘I talked to my dad whenever he was in town’ means any or all the times he was in town – it might have been a hundred times or two, I can’t tell, but not the one time like the other more accurate sentence.
It doesn’t make me mad, but it very briefly ruffles my feathers. (e: and then I move right on)
I honestly get why it bugs you, there are things like that that bug me too. I can’t think of any at the moment (fairly intoxicated), but I definitely know of some words (not specifically at the moment, again, intoxicated) that irk me when misused. Not as much now that I’m older and I’ve met incredibly intelligent people who can’t even spell their own name. Well, that and my own ego has shrank by at least three quarters.
When I believed that I was some hyper intelligent alien, every misuse of a word made me cringe to my core.
At 38 years old (recently gained a year because for some reason I thought I was 39), I realize that I’m not shit and younger me just needed to feel superior for whatever reason.
I don’t know. I’m drunk. Sorry if I made no sense or was insulting in some way.
I hate that people treat the US as if it doesn’t have a wide variety of accents. I can drive an hour in any direction and the people sound different than where I live. A lot of states have their own accents, and there are regional accents within them. I live in Illinois and people from No. IL and Central IL sound completely different from people in So. IL.
Accents get even more differentiated the further North or South you go. PNW sounds different than NE. Etc. The real difference is that a lot of the accents in the US aren’t based on indigenous languages spoken in that region (even though some are), they’re largely based on the group of Europeans that settled in the region.
Americans are very very good at code switching, which is why I think a lot of people think there are only one or two accents.
Man, in my neck of the woods, you can tell which town someone is from by accent. I'm not even joking or exaggerating. This is a rural area, with towns that are close in terms of driving distance, but that were originally formed by distinct immigrant groups. Even with TV amd radio kinda smoothing out accents in general, there's still plenty of difference.
As an example, there's a town maybe twenty minutes away where when they say yes and it's "yay-us". My town it's more yeah-s as a single syllable. Two towns the other direction, it's yeah-us. And that kind of difference is across everything, not just one or two words. The degree of drawl, whether or not you get elisions at specific places in words, it's all part of it.
People from the dimwit town I grew up in pronounce garage as "gararge" it drove me insane. Also, the main attraction of the town is a gas station that sells ice cream.
I'm from NC. My mom is from IL. Neither one of us can pronounce the word "horror." She pronounces it precisely like "whore" and I can't get over it. I, myself, dislike "harrr" movies.
Added bonus: I am a grown-ass adult and the only way I don't stumble introducing myself is if I do it like everyone else did growing up: by pronouncing the L in my name like a Y. I cannot pronounce my own fucking name and it's not even a disability. Usually, I just hope no one notices.
One of the more entertaining parts of learning another language is the extra attention to sound has made me super aware, more and more, of what speaking quirks I still have that weren't smoothed out by the midwestern influence which is considered to be the "general" American accent.
The lingering Chicago dictates random K's must immediately be followed by a Y (Shikyaaga!), but the southern part of me demands that any L at the end of a word is a W now and we're dropping consonants like we drop relatives when they come out as humanitarian. I'm horrified, I feel so bad for any foreigner who has to talk to me.
I grew up in Podunk Northeast Texas so I have the drawl. But I left and spent a lot of time all up and down the eastern seaboard married to a woman that grew up out west. So my brain added every affectation I ran across to the drawl.
Now I have the long vowel sounds in a fairly rapid speech pattern, do the weird O sound they use in South Carolina, will occasionally pronounce house like I'm from Ontario, and have a hard time saying my first name if I don't concentrate.
I still sound mostly like a shoeless Texas hillbilly bootlegger but with a bunch of exceptions. So it makes me sound drunk as hell, until I am drunk. Then the exceptions leave and I sound like I just got off work at the oil rig and I'm headed to the strip club to cheat on my wife before heading back to the trailer.
I just doubt it when I heard this argument, here in Brazil even your neighbor have a different accent cause they are son of two German, Lebanese, Japanese or Italian descendants and you are from the same but your other parent are from another culture and then you are so lost you create your own accent that sometimes speaks one or the other holy shit I don't know who I am.
Dude, I LOVE Brazilians. I went for a little over 2 weeks in July. People were so nice, respectful, considerate, and laid back. I want to spend a month there next time I go.
Also, your bananas are on another level. I haven't eaten a banana in the US since I got back.
I usually send people this video when they say that all Americans have the same accent. Shoot even within the same cities you'll find different accents. It does a great job of showing just how different they can all be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMS70m-OzXo
i never really thought of it a code switching, but that's an apt description. there's definitely "professional" me and "hometown-accent-in-full-force" me.
Also from IL, southern. Near StL. The accents change like a proximity ring the further or closer you get to downtown, and even then going Ozarks MO is still different from Troy IL.
When I was in law school I did a deep dive on the formation of Illinois and ended up going down a big rabbit hole of the dialects of Southern Illinois. The reason different parts of southern Illinois have accents that sound so different is because a lot of people settled there from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and even thought towns were closish to each other the accents were very different because of the group of southern settlers. Super interesting. Where I’m from in Southern Illinois people have a very unique and unmistakable accent.
Americans are very very good at code switching, which is why I think a lot of people think there are only one or two accents.
Is this why I can hear my Finnish friend's "generic euro" accent when no one else can?
(She travels a lot and has a very, very weak Finnish accent, but a fairly strong "generic European" accent. None of our other European friends can hear it; the only people who can are American and even then it's inconsistent).
That's a thing with us Europeans - especially if you don't want to perfectly adopt a British or American accent. This is when you end up with the "euro accent" - you're perfectly fluent in English, without the accent of your native language, but since its neither British nor American English, it sounds just the slightest bit different.
Ok, if you're going to talk accents, you have got to include Pennsylvania Dutch.
Everyone always talks about Southern accents, New England accents, Texas accents, Cajun, etc. Pennsylvania Dutch always gets left out, and I think it's a fantastic accent.
You get more hyper-local accents like the Boston, Philly and NYC accents in the older US cities, and fewer in places that haven't been densely settled as long.
Is there a difference between a Las Vegas accent and a Pheonix or Los Angeles accent? Honestly, I don't really know.
Still, there's fewer hyper local accents and accents tend to be spoken over a wider area. Probably also because the US has had relatively large amounts of internal migration. Also, I assume average people travel further on average than they used to when wagons were the state of the art.
Europeans have been settling in North America for 500 years. The United States being a young country has nothing to do with the evolution of accents and dialects. When the US was formed the Spanish had been in the Americas for 200 years, the French and English not much less, in addition to enslaved Africans who brought their own native languages to the continent and then were forced to learn English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese. That alone is more than enough time and groups of people for dialects and accents to develop.
Then you compare that to say England, that has been around for several millenia and has had influence from Celtic, Gaelic, Norse, Germanic, French and even Spanish to extent for hundreds or thousands of years before America existed. And then since America existed has had influence from Indians, Chinese, enslaved Africans and other immigrant cultures from around the world, just like America did. Then its just not really comparable at all. 200 years is legitimately nothing on the time scales needed for the depth of accents to form and Americans just don't understand that at all. It's like a European talking about 100 miles being a long distance, an American would scoff at that idea.
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.
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.
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 theythinkthis is true.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm a Canadian living in Korea and sometimes have to explain to locals that the reason I've never been to Vancouver is because I lived on the opposite coast and it would take a week to drive there. In Korea, aside from a few outlying islands, you can never be more than four hours away from anywhere else in the country.
This is what most people on Lemmy don't understand when they complain about cars in North America. Texas and California combined are the size of all of Europe. America and Canada are very large. In most situations we do need cars to live a normal life.
The size of the country/states isn't really the issue, right? You can cross Europe via train pretty easily, 4hrs London to Amsterdam, longer over land than Dallas to San Antonio for example, but I'd assume a normal life doesn't regularly involve driving all around the state. Most of daily life is just within a city or region, the size of the country is irrelevant there.
There absolutely are major factors that basically force North Americans into cars, I agree, but I don't think size is an excuse for those factors.
edit: This video talks about the 'North America is too big' argument in detail, but fair warning, the creator is a bit annoyed and crass at the start and talking about comments they get. You can skip to 2:30 to jump over it.
I think a lot of it is historical. America and Canada had virtually unlimited land for growth, so everything just sprawled outward. In Europe you're crossing multiple countries to travel the continent like you said. Since space was always a concern, more thought has been put into the designs and layouts. There are enormous American cities with poor public transit, and even if they had good public transit, it would take a long time to go from one part of the city to another. We've seen thoughtful layouts and good public transportation in dense cities where it makes sense, like SF, NYC, and Seattle. Cars are convenient for urban and rural sprawl, and there wasn't a lot of motivation for alternatives until recently.
BTW, you can cross the United States in a train too, but it'll take you 79 hours.
Parts of it is historical, although it shouldn't be understated that a lot of it was political (in the sense of powerful business interests influencing policy to advance their economic interest) and poor urban planning forcing that sprawl. As the video mentions, public transit like trains and streetcars necessarily predated the advent of the mass produced automobile around 1930, a long time after the initial sprawling. Almost all cities had them, they were removed and not replaced.
What I mean by this is that even with the open colonial sprawl, the current state of things was avoidable and, although increasingly difficult, can be undone and improved.
Oh yes, there's definitely a political element to it, driven (no pun intended) by business desires. I just read on Lemmy today that Michelin Tire Company started reviewing restaurants and awarding stars hoping to motivate people to drive further for culinary experiences. Driving further meant more wear on their tires, and thus more profit. That's the kind of genius marketing plan that I don't see very often today, and is a great example of those business influences at work.
The notion of "jaywalking" is also invented whole-cloth by the car industry. Prior to that, streets were a place that people could walk or ride safely, cross wherever the want, or even just hang out and maybe just get out of the way if someone wants to get by. A "jay" was an insult sort of like "loser".
Their older history is not a significant factor in European cities being more walkable/cyclable. In fact, thanks to the impact of WWII, many European cities had to be rebuilt and are those in some ways younger than significant American, Canadian, and Australian cities. The Netherlands, often the posterchild of walkability and cyclability, was heading very much in the same direction as the US in the post-war period, up until the Stop de Kindermoord movement of the 1970s started a versal of that trend. And even then, it wasn't a complete 180. Government votes supportive of stopping the child murder only barely won out over car-dependency, and many local businesses and entrenched interests were just as staunchly opposed to improved design in the Netherlands as they so often are today in places like America and Australia.
It's definitely possible for car-dependent cities and countries to improve. It just requires people supportive of change to speak up. Convince others to also be supportive. Most importantly, contact your representatives and vote for people who can be convinced to do better.
I'd heard the Michelin story repeated a couple of times by a friend, and it sort of checks out. The Michelin Guide was originally more a general guide for French motorists in 1900, to increase said demand for driving and therefore their tires, although when the restaurant section became more popular, they started hiring anonymous reviewers in the 20s and then eventually awarding stars about 30 years after the initial publication.
1 star : "A very good restaurant in its category" (Une très bonne table dans sa catégorie)
2 stars : "Excellent cooking, worth a detour" (Table excellente, mérite un détour)
3 stars : "Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey" (Une des meilleures tables, vaut le voyage)
So it's not as if it was a masterminded plan, a decent marketing tool just sort of evolved into a restaurant reviewing guide.
These days, yeah, but I used to live in country town Australia, without a car or license then either. I admit, that was harder, and did limit my options, but the majority of people don't live in country towns in Australia or the US
this is such a fucking wild logic, why would the size of your country have any relationship whatsoever to needing a car? Do you think the moscow subway is worthless because siberia is in the same country?
Who in their right mind would even drive across the US? you'd take an airplane!
Yeah, I'm similar, living almost in the middle of the west coast in Oregon, USA. I can drive 20 hours south and only change states once. That's traveling 65MPH+ most of the time.
The trouble with Alaska is that driving is often impossible. Ketchikan to Anchorage is a 36 hour drive that goes through two Canadian provinces and that's only halfway across.
If you fell asleep at the beginning of a 4 hour drive where I live, and woke up at the end, odds are very very high that you wouldn't be able to tell any difference in the surroundings.
There are many states where you can drive more than 4 hours and not leave, but now I wonder about the reverse: what is the maximum number of states you can reach in a 4-hour drive?
Surely, the route has to be through many of the small states in New England. I think it would be tough to reach more than 5.
Without traffic you might be able to get Maine,new Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and maybe Pennsylvania, but that route would take you through/close to Boston and New York City, so there'll be traffic
One state was gone in 3 hours, the next in about 5 MINUTES since it was just the tip, and the remaining 9 took me to the other side. Granted, at the time, the speed limit was 60 the entire way, and the vehicle was limited to 55 for the trailer.
I was thinking Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia. Technically more like 15 minutes going through Hagerstown, MD but I'm not even from the area and just have a fascination with border quirks
The 9 hour state has to be either PA or TN, either that or they crossed the Mississippi River and cut across the tip of Missouri or Illinois. That last state has to be one of the bigger ones. I suppose Florida is also a 9 hour state
Yes! My favorite part is that when they realized that it was south of the 49th parallel, Britain tried to see if they could just have it. Obviously that didn't happen.
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.
There are different accents in the US. Talk to people from Texas, Louisiana, Rhode Island, and California, they all sound different with the person from Louisiana probably being the most incomprehensible.
For that matter talk to someone from Dallas, TX and then someone from Tulsa, OK. That's only a 4 1/2 hour drive. They will both sound different. I'm pretty sure there's a different accent in Oklahoma City compared to Tulsa, and a different one in San Antonio compared to Dallas.
youre thinking about Cajun English, which is getting less and less common, and really is found in the southern parts of Louisiana. most louisiana residents not from deep in the bayou speak relatively comprehensibly.
Had to look up a Louisiana accent just to see, and it sounds a bit different in some unnameable way but still definitely just South. Aside from being able to pick out she must be from some nebulous southern state that wasn't NC, I think we could have gotten along fine.
Which I guess just means you and I wouldn't be able to communicate in person if I played up my childhood accent even a little. Which is fair. The day I introduced my first bf to my dad, I still vividly remember having to stand in as translator between them and I still don't understand how that happened. He was only one state up, and from a more rural area.
So there is not law or rule specifically about having to exit a roundabout. So in theory, yes you could. But you are likely to have the cops come ask you to leave before that, as that could possibly be seen as dangerous driving.
When I tell American that it takes 6 hours of highway driving to leave my state they are flabbergasted. after 4 hours they might be in the same part of the country but they have probably crossed a few state lines.
Must be talking to east coasters, because there are plenty of US states where that's the case. My state is about 11 hours tall, and 4 hours wide.
A six hour drive is commonly just referred to as going up north for a long weekend.
Thank you for giving me my new default. This party mix of measuring systems sounds way more infuriating to tell people than "about five and a half CDs."
This is how I learned Australia has states. Why the fuck do y'all have states? You're one single island with nothing in the middle! I legit thought Queensland was a county til right now!
Also. Why, in Queensland, is there a place called Texas! I'm going to come over there!
I live in Alabama, and it takes a little over 6 hours of interstate travel at roughly 70mph to get to Florida, 5.5 hours if you just don’t stop at all. I can hit Georgia in about 2.5 hours. There is no reason to go to Mississippi, so I don’t know. And I think it’s about like 4.5 hours to Tennessee, but once again not many reasons to go there so I’m not sure.
Where are you that’s 4.5 hrs from Tennessee and 6 hours from Florida? I can hit the Florida line from Birmingham in about 3.5, and can be on Nashville in about the same… meaning I can drive from the Tennessee line to Florala in about 6 hours- and that’s the whole state lol.
I’m in Birmingham, but I have 2 kids and a fabled partner. I typed in my address to perdido key and got 5.5 hours nonstop. I used that as a reference because it’s right across the line, and there’s a good reason to be there. That’s why I made the joke of 6.5 hours or 5.5 hours if I don’t stop. I also mentioned that trip was interstate only. There are slightly faster ways to go, but involve leaving the interstate.
I also picked Perdido because when my mom kidnapped me when I was 5 and eventually legally divorced my dad. I had to make the trip every other weekend from Perdido to Birmingham. We would meet halfway in Greenville Alabama. Until I was 8. That’s when she died and I moved back to Birmingham permanently. So, Perdido is a place right across the state line that is familiar to me.
Then I qualified that trip to Tennessee with “I think”, because I am very poor, and just like Mississippi I have no reason to go there even if I had money enough to do so. The last time I went to Tennessee it took like 4.5 hours to get where I was going I think. But, unlike Florida I didn’t care enough to pick a point and actually type it into google maps to figure out the length of time it would take.
So, you caught me. I guesstimated one of my destinations.
TRY 12 HOURS NON-STOP MOTHERFUCKER. IT TAKES 12 HOURS TO GET FROM ONE SIDE OF MY STATE TO THE NEXT AT SPEEDS RANGING FROM 75MPH/120KM/H TO 90MPH/144KM/H
No, seriously, it's literally over 1,300km (approx 800mi) between Texarkana and El Paso (I believe that's the straight-line distance; it honestly takes longer than 10-ish hours to get from one side to the other without stopping for food, gas or bathrooms). You were probably talking to people from the tiny far-northern states.
Really depends on where you are in the US. Northeast, yeah, the states there are relatively small. It takes 3.5 hours on an interstate highway to cross Ohio, a "middle-sized" state. Switch to state roads, and that time frame goes up dramatically.
Yeah Australia is slightly different to the US in that it's huge but there are very few people living here. Take the largest state: Western Australia which is literally 4 times the size of Texas. But do people drive from Adelaide (capital of South Australia) to Perth (capital of Western Australia)? No, not generally. It takes 28 hours of non-stop driving. And the thing is, there is hardly anything in between. This means you have to be careful about fuel stops and maybe even have a satellite phone. Look up the Nullarbor Plain of you're interested.
People "from the country" might drive several hours to visit relatives and you might drive 3-4 hours to go to a camping/holiday destination, but if you're headed to another major city, you are most likely going to fly.
The closest other capital city to Adelaide is Melbourne but that's still ~8 hours away by car. But there is a really nice scenic route called the Great Ocean Road which you would usually do over a a few days.
Why do you go on the internet and lie mate? I'm in Perth quite often pop over to radelaide for a frog cake at smoko. I would recommend anyone after a nice walk just give it a crack, it's like 15mins max. I think they put in a bike path recently too.
They're also not from Jersey. Or at least, I think most of them were from Long Island. I'm honestly not committed to remembering what few things I did at one point know about that show.
You can drive from Buffalo to Toronto in less than 4 hours, and that includes the time it takes to cross the border. I've made the drive, and can confirm that it takes less than 4 hours.
It's an I threshing observation I had a. Boss yrs ago who shut down the woek for 3 weeks when he took his family to the Olympics in the states. The first thing he commented on was how boring it is to drive there when going any kind of distance due to massive long straight sections of roads
ITT: americans bragging about having to pay absurd sums of money on a car so they can spend 4 hours per day driving to and from work, when in other countries that would be 2 hours on a train at like a 20th the cost
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
What a braindead take, everything in the second panel 100% also applies to the first. In fact, the us is more diverse like are you fucking kidding me???
"We've redecorated this building to how it looked over 50 years ago!"
Favourite fuckin comedian
One thing that came as a culture shock for me is that I'm used to driving like 4 hours to see relatives. And this is usually several times a year. Then I heard from some Britons that they have rarely visit their relatives who are only like a hour drive away. Really messed me up the first time.
Years ago I bought a used drum set from eBay for my daughter's Christmas present. The eBay auction was pick up only.
No big deal. It was only three hours drive each way. I did it on a Saturday. Drove there, picked it up, then drove home. All done in less than seven hours.
Wrapping it was the tricky part.
That sounds like a fun outting. Hope she enjoyed the gift!
I've heard similar things. Like, I've had work commutes that are an hour long before. (Not that that's healthy or ideal, but it's far from rare)
And they say we should all just switch to electric bikes like in the Netherlands. I tried showing them a comparison of the states using a map but turns out "I am just being difficult"
The "map" is not the problem, you just completely fucked up your city planning. Size of a country has zero impact on your daily commute.
Lol Ok. Guess everyone has to crowd together in comparatively tiny little cities. All this usable land outside the cities is now uninhabitable. Genius.
Let me guess, we will own nothing and be happy, right? Oh and don't forget about eating bugs!! Yum yum!
Go slink back to hexbear.
Are you completely insane?
Your response has nothing to do with my comment.
Here I'll speak slowly
We have a big country. Big spaces mean longer commute. City design can't change physics of space-time.That's not how cities work. That's just how America decided to approach that problem.
To spell it out for you: your commute is always in your local area. The size of your country is not relevant to your local area. What is relevant, is density. Density though, has nothing to do with the size of your country. Unfortunately, you are about twice as dense as Hong Kong.
I worked on a session in the nearest big metro to my small Texas town of 200,000 - daily commute of 2 hours and 25 minutes to get there in the morning, then 2 hours 25 minutes home (closer to 4 hours to get home on traffic heavy days). Not really unheard of.
Then, a few months ago - took a vacation on the beach island of South Padre, Texas then had to rush to a client in north Texas that next day. 12 hours of driving, all without leaving the state.
UK drivers know nothing of the true road trip life.
I'd say the 2 1/2 hour commute is pretty unheard of. I've never heard of it before. That sounds like hell. My boss's is 90 mins and he's always complaining.
I used to have a 40 mile/65km commute one way. I hated it. Inevitably someone would wad their car up on the highway, closing three lanes down to one lane during rush hour, and it would rapidly become a 90-minute commute.
Boss should find a good podcast and learn to meditate. Driving is my zen, especially on long highway stretches. I guess it also depends largely on if there's a love of driving and what vehicle you're in.
Thankfully it was just for 1 artist and we were done in about 3 weeks.
As a temporary thing it's not that bad but it's also an extra 5 hours on your day. I've done 3.5 hrs for a client meeting but at that point that hour long meeting is all I'm getting done that day
Sounds like when I lived in Tyler and had to work in the DFW Metro for a job. I spent months driving back and forth. Luckily my travel was paid.
That's what this was, actually. TyTX - > DFW - > TyTX. Daily. You feel me.
Yeah, I do. Right after I got done doing it for work the singer in our band booked us at Trees. So I spent all that time driving back and forth, then drove out on Saturday with a car full of equipment.
It's not like it was a big deal and that's such a fun venue. I had a great time. I just can't think of it without remembering that drive haha.
I hope you had a place to store your equipment there so you didn't have to load and unload everyday at least. Doing that every day would have been my nightmare.
That sounds horrible
Losing nearly 5 hours of your life just driving is pretty crazy. I've done East Yorkshire to Cardiff and back in a day to collect something and that took the best part of 9 hours with good traffic. In bad traffic that could have easily been 13 and it's not that far.
Why do Americans always do this weird almost-brag about this stuff?
that's uh, that's not healthy. 1 hour each way is just about the maximum daily commute that is sane.
I mean, this sounds just like a big city thing, not an American thing. I live in Paris and hour long commutes are common here too.
As European cities are close together though, this can lead to situations where travelling between cities is not what takes the most time. I once (about a year ago) travelled a Paris-London which took me about 5 hours from start to finish - the Eurostar takes only just over 2 hours. The rest was travelling from my home to Gare du Nord, from St. Pancras to my destination, and border checks before boarding at Gare du Nord (thank Brexit for that one).
I get that from other people in the US sometimes, too. I live in Los Angeles county, and when people come from other places to visit they often think they can see way more things in one day than is reasonably feasible. Santa Barbara and San Diego are like 200 miles apart and it's going to take 5 or 6 hours from one to the other. The Hollywood sign and Disneyland are 30+ miles apart and a good hour separate.
I live in Jacksonville, FL and people overseas often think I'm right next door to Miami because it's also in Florida. It's a six hour drive!
Well Jacksonville is the biggest city on the US Mainland, and the most populous city in Florida, its easy to see the confusion.
I grew up in SoCal and this is why I have barely ever been anywhere. It's dense enough around here.
I would make the point (not necessarily for an hour's drive) that the roads are often more tiring to drive on in the UK -- that is, they're not as flat, wide or straight as freeways often are, so require more concentration. Driving for an hour along Welsh country lanes doesn't feel the same as hitting the freeway for an hour. Just my two cents/tuppence
The mountains of Northern California are treacherous. Many of the highways up there are frequently shut down for extended periods.
Being from SoCal and having lived in the UK, let me explain:
In the UK many of the roads are quite literally conversions from horse drawn carriage paths. In some cases, a drunk wanker from Liverpool could draw a better line for a road than most roads connecting off many of the UK motorways (Especially in Wales or Scotland). Add in round abouts, hills, creeks, rivers and stupidly narrow bridges, it's difficult.
I'd sincerely rather drive the Grapevine through Mammoth into Yosemite Village with black ice warnings than try and drive myself from Maidenbower, West Sussex UK to Dundee, Scotland again tbh.
What roads did you take? A majority of that is dualed.
While living in the UK, I bought a Heritage pass and took off almost every weekend either by light rail or by car. When my wife came to visit though, we drove from my flat near Crawley to Scotland over a 3 day trip. We visited in order: Ashford, Broomfield (Leeds Castle), Rettondon, Chelmsford, Ipswitch, Cambridge, Nottingham, Leeds, Newcastle upon Tyne, Edinburgh, Perth and finally ending in Dundee where I have distant relatives.
In all my trips, driving through the hills of Yorkshire and Cumbria are the scariest, but getting to Scone Palace outside of Perth through snow was quite challenging.
So not really the main roads.
Most of the non main roads are a result of the feudal farming system. The US differs because people could buy up large rectangles of land which fit nicely together. The farming in Europe was a piecemeal affair, and roads were built onto to that. The UK is a very London centric country. The further north you get the less that is spent on roads and transport.
Yeah the Karen migrations are rough.
Or even at night. Lotta these highways though just a straight line can be real dangerous.
Yeah, I can understand that. My cars got cruise control. Id doubt thatd be very effective in the UK less your in some scenic area like the Cotswolds.
Same experience when my wife and I went to Scotland to visit friends. We were in Glasgow and wanted to check out Edinburgh, less than an hour bus ride, for the day. They told us that we were crazy and that's a whole weekend trip.
We laughed pretty hard. A full hour drive is only half of a daily work commute in Toronto, on a good day.
I used to commute Edinburgh - Glasgow, and plenty of others do the same. It's also common for folk to do the trip just for an evening to go to a gig or something (a lot of tours will have their only Scottish date in Glasgow). I think your friends were probably meaning that you'd need more than a day to fully be able to see what Glasgow has to offer? If not, that seems really odd as it's a busy commuter route.
Nope, they were really saying that you can't see anything there unless you go for the whole weekend.
We walked around, checked out the castle, saw a lame touristy film about Nessy, sampled some incredible whisky and were home for dinner.
It was kinda the same with St Abbs. They said we had to leave Friday morning and leave Sunday evening (again from Glasgow) or we wouldn't get to do much. Now I'm not going to say the place isn't gorgeous, but what we did was hang out in a... cottage? I'm not sure what to rightly call it, but we hung out at someone's place, played board games, played cards, hung out by the bluffs, on the beach etc.
I don't disagree that it was a relaxing and fun weekend, but we didn't need to spend a full 2.5 days there to do what we did. They made it seem like if we lost even an hour the weekend was lost.
Canadian here. I drive 4 times a year to my family cottage 8 hours away.
I'm in Winnipeg. A friend of mine has a family cottage 2 hours north of thunder Bay.
It makes no sense to me why they continue to torture themselves by keeping this property.
Why don't you sell your cottage and buy something closer?
History. My grandfather bought it 70 years ago. It's an old school house... That he actually went to school in. He died it too.
Besides that, we still have family and generations of friends we still know and love in nearby.
It's located on an Unesco site on the bay de chaleur. It's not worth a lot either. Im pretty sure I'd be trading down if I bought another place. I doubt I'd find a spot that beautiful.
Anyway, the drive is stunning and it doesn't bother me.
It turns out it's not the distance to our family that's important, we just don't fucking like them
Then you obviously dont apply to my analogy then. Knew someone would comment that eventually.
I've got four different countries, with different languages and currencies, within a four hour drive from my house. I only drive if the road trip is the goal.
Here in Australia, during the 80's, 90's before widespread internet. There would be several European's who needed rescuing each year as they decided to try and walk between major cities, because it looks close on a map.
I remember one German guy who needed rescuing while trying to walk from Sydney to Adelaide...that's 1200km away...in a straight line.
Joke’s on him for wanting to go to Adelaide, honestly.
And remember, never go to Adelaide. It's a hole (Not the Sunscreen Song)
Also in Europe if you get hungry you can pick mushrooms, skin a boar, or pop in to a town. In Australia you got... witchetty grub
Lmao just looked on a map, and it's quite easy to see that that distance is comparable to walking from Great Yarmouth to St Davids.... twice
In the US, 100 years is a long time.
In England, 100 miles is a long distance.
In star trek, 100 miles is a lot of transporter chiefs.
Hey now he got promoted once
In the delta quadrant, 70,000 years is a long distance
Lol, that's great.
I've also heard of Europeans planning vacations in the US, expecting to see New York, Florida, Texas, LA, etc. without realizing how much travel that is.
I met a foreign exchange student in Australia. I asked what they were planning to do for their break.
They'd recently taken up surfing, and couldn't decide if they wanted to surf the east, west, north, or south coast. So they had decided they would stay in Alice Springs, basically in the middle of all of them, and do day trips to each one.
I didn't have the heart to tell them that to get to the nearest ocean from there takes about two solid days of driving. Add another day to get to a beach with decent surf.
Found out the same between Tokyo and Okinawa. It's like flying from Washington DC to Miami. "Just take a train," is 32 hours, plus time on a ferry.
Not a really a day trip, even though it "seems like Japan is a small country."
That's more like saying to catch a train from Miami to Puerto Rico. No one is gonna build all that train line over the ocean for hundreds and hundreds of miles 😆
Canada has a highway that goes between the most easterly and westerly points of the country. If you drove from end to end, stopping only for gas and drive through meals, it would take you about a week.
The most easterly and westerly points on the mainland. You're not getting from Vancouver Island to Newfoundland by highway.
There are ferries.
That guy just have been a huge idiot, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people know how far away New York and Los Angeles are from each other.
Ah right yeah fair enough! I thought you meant it happened in the past 15 years or something!
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.
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.
if the MBTA ever gets its shit together, cars could disappear entirely in the city
don't hold your breath for that one
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.
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.
Need some more trains.
there is traffic ahead of us
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".
Traveling across the US is like switching to an alternate dimension where everything is pretty much the same, but a few things are off. Like, Congress is the same, but suddenly there are dunkin' donuts everywhere and the land is weirdly flat
People say ‘whenever’ instead of ‘when’ and I want to clock them for it.
eta: I’m specifically disparaging the southern US states here. They just flat-out use words wrong, and I can say that now that I’m too far away for them to kick my ass.
Except the guy you're responding said 'everywhere'
Thanks for sharing though.
I can see why you've read it that way, but I'm quite sure they're saying that some people say a word slightly differently in another part of the USA and they're joking that it makes them angry.
Oh I get it. The way it was written makes it a strange non sequitur.
Indeed!
Yes, this, thank you. Sorry, my jokes sometimes come off too aggressive online. I’m trying to work on that.
I think the commenter might have been talking about Americans in general.
So they take the opportunity whenever they can?
I just like to make stupid posts, sorry.
I’m right with you haha.
I thought about it and I say “whenever” pretty often.
It’s a weird thing to bother someone so much.
Whenever I think about the silly little things that bother people, I’m all, “Whatever could there reason be?”
But four a real problem, like one that should bug someone! I used to could go through a day without pain. I reckon I’m done got old.
Wander how the commenter wood fill about that. To much little stuff bothers folks. Shood worry about big thangs.
It’s a minor niggle I was joking about with hyperbole, but it does bother me a bit because ‘when’ means a specific time and ‘whenever’ means any of multiple times. Their meaning isn’t interchangeable.
Like: ‘I talked to my dad when he was in town’ means I talked with him that last time he was in town, but ‘I talked to my dad whenever he was in town’ means any or all the times he was in town – it might have been a hundred times or two, I can’t tell, but not the one time like the other more accurate sentence.
It doesn’t make me mad, but it very briefly ruffles my feathers. (e: and then I move right on)
I honestly get why it bugs you, there are things like that that bug me too. I can’t think of any at the moment (fairly intoxicated), but I definitely know of some words (not specifically at the moment, again, intoxicated) that irk me when misused. Not as much now that I’m older and I’ve met incredibly intelligent people who can’t even spell their own name. Well, that and my own ego has shrank by at least three quarters.
When I believed that I was some hyper intelligent alien, every misuse of a word made me cringe to my core.
At 38 years old (recently gained a year because for some reason I thought I was 39), I realize that I’m not shit and younger me just needed to feel superior for whatever reason.
I don’t know. I’m drunk. Sorry if I made no sense or was insulting in some way.
Hope you’re having a good night.
I hate that people treat the US as if it doesn’t have a wide variety of accents. I can drive an hour in any direction and the people sound different than where I live. A lot of states have their own accents, and there are regional accents within them. I live in Illinois and people from No. IL and Central IL sound completely different from people in So. IL.
Accents get even more differentiated the further North or South you go. PNW sounds different than NE. Etc. The real difference is that a lot of the accents in the US aren’t based on indigenous languages spoken in that region (even though some are), they’re largely based on the group of Europeans that settled in the region.
Americans are very very good at code switching, which is why I think a lot of people think there are only one or two accents.
Man, in my neck of the woods, you can tell which town someone is from by accent. I'm not even joking or exaggerating. This is a rural area, with towns that are close in terms of driving distance, but that were originally formed by distinct immigrant groups. Even with TV amd radio kinda smoothing out accents in general, there's still plenty of difference.
As an example, there's a town maybe twenty minutes away where when they say yes and it's "yay-us". My town it's more yeah-s as a single syllable. Two towns the other direction, it's yeah-us. And that kind of difference is across everything, not just one or two words. The degree of drawl, whether or not you get elisions at specific places in words, it's all part of it.
People from the dimwit town I grew up in pronounce garage as "gararge" it drove me insane. Also, the main attraction of the town is a gas station that sells ice cream.
I'm from NC. My mom is from IL. Neither one of us can pronounce the word "horror." She pronounces it precisely like "whore" and I can't get over it. I, myself, dislike "harrr" movies.
Added bonus: I am a grown-ass adult and the only way I don't stumble introducing myself is if I do it like everyone else did growing up: by pronouncing the L in my name like a Y. I cannot pronounce my own fucking name and it's not even a disability. Usually, I just hope no one notices.
One of the more entertaining parts of learning another language is the extra attention to sound has made me super aware, more and more, of what speaking quirks I still have that weren't smoothed out by the midwestern influence which is considered to be the "general" American accent.
The lingering Chicago dictates random K's must immediately be followed by a Y (Shikyaaga!), but the southern part of me demands that any L at the end of a word is a W now and we're dropping consonants like we drop relatives when they come out as humanitarian. I'm horrified, I feel so bad for any foreigner who has to talk to me.
You mean harrified?
Yes, I do :(
Lol, I knew someone was going to call me on that.
Lol don't sweat it man lol, I've lived in my state my whole life and people think I'm from California or something when they hear me speak
I grew up in Podunk Northeast Texas so I have the drawl. But I left and spent a lot of time all up and down the eastern seaboard married to a woman that grew up out west. So my brain added every affectation I ran across to the drawl.
Now I have the long vowel sounds in a fairly rapid speech pattern, do the weird O sound they use in South Carolina, will occasionally pronounce house like I'm from Ontario, and have a hard time saying my first name if I don't concentrate.
I still sound mostly like a shoeless Texas hillbilly bootlegger but with a bunch of exceptions. So it makes me sound drunk as hell, until I am drunk. Then the exceptions leave and I sound like I just got off work at the oil rig and I'm headed to the strip club to cheat on my wife before heading back to the trailer.
I say horror a little bit like "harror"
Is it good ice cream?
Eh. Its ok. They had decent sundaes the last time I went like 6 years ago.
I just doubt it when I heard this argument, here in Brazil even your neighbor have a different accent cause they are son of two German, Lebanese, Japanese or Italian descendants and you are from the same but your other parent are from another culture and then you are so lost you create your own accent that sometimes speaks one or the other holy shit I don't know who I am.
Dude, I LOVE Brazilians. I went for a little over 2 weeks in July. People were so nice, respectful, considerate, and laid back. I want to spend a month there next time I go.
Also, your bananas are on another level. I haven't eaten a banana in the US since I got back.
I usually send people this video when they say that all Americans have the same accent. Shoot even within the same cities you'll find different accents. It does a great job of showing just how different they can all be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMS70m-OzXo
i never really thought of it a code switching, but that's an apt description. there's definitely "professional" me and "hometown-accent-in-full-force" me.
Also from IL, southern. Near StL. The accents change like a proximity ring the further or closer you get to downtown, and even then going Ozarks MO is still different from Troy IL.
When I was in law school I did a deep dive on the formation of Illinois and ended up going down a big rabbit hole of the dialects of Southern Illinois. The reason different parts of southern Illinois have accents that sound so different is because a lot of people settled there from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and even thought towns were closish to each other the accents were very different because of the group of southern settlers. Super interesting. Where I’m from in Southern Illinois people have a very unique and unmistakable accent.
I worked on the river so I got used to every southern and local accent as the line boats came through.
Is this why I can hear my Finnish friend's "generic euro" accent when no one else can?
(She travels a lot and has a very, very weak Finnish accent, but a fairly strong "generic European" accent. None of our other European friends can hear it; the only people who can are American and even then it's inconsistent).
That's a thing with us Europeans - especially if you don't want to perfectly adopt a British or American accent. This is when you end up with the "euro accent" - you're perfectly fluent in English, without the accent of your native language, but since its neither British nor American English, it sounds just the slightest bit different.
Ok, if you're going to talk accents, you have got to include Pennsylvania Dutch.
Everyone always talks about Southern accents, New England accents, Texas accents, Cajun, etc. Pennsylvania Dutch always gets left out, and I think it's a fantastic accent.
Doug Madenford is my go to example:
https://youtu.be/wjr2CexQ5V4
Because comparatively it doesn't.
Your country simply hasn't existed long enough pre industrialisation for a broad range of accents to develop.
The US isn't a uniform age.
You get more hyper-local accents like the Boston, Philly and NYC accents in the older US cities, and fewer in places that haven't been densely settled as long.
Is there a difference between a Las Vegas accent and a Pheonix or Los Angeles accent? Honestly, I don't really know.
Still, there's fewer hyper local accents and accents tend to be spoken over a wider area. Probably also because the US has had relatively large amounts of internal migration. Also, I assume average people travel further on average than they used to when wagons were the state of the art.
Europeans have been settling in North America for 500 years. The United States being a young country has nothing to do with the evolution of accents and dialects. When the US was formed the Spanish had been in the Americas for 200 years, the French and English not much less, in addition to enslaved Africans who brought their own native languages to the continent and then were forced to learn English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese. That alone is more than enough time and groups of people for dialects and accents to develop.
Then you compare that to say England, that has been around for several millenia and has had influence from Celtic, Gaelic, Norse, Germanic, French and even Spanish to extent for hundreds or thousands of years before America existed. And then since America existed has had influence from Indians, Chinese, enslaved Africans and other immigrant cultures from around the world, just like America did. Then its just not really comparable at all. 200 years is legitimately nothing on the time scales needed for the depth of accents to form and Americans just don't understand that at all. It's like a European talking about 100 miles being a long distance, an American would scoff at that idea.
I remember this as, "Europeans think 100 miles is far away, Americans think 100 years is a long time."
Great way to look at it.
You can drive for four hours and still be on I-5 in LA.
Yeah, define 'driving' lol
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.
Try in Italy, you drive 2 hours and you need subtitles for understanding the tv series filmed in that city
Yesterday I drove 4 hours and went from northern Minnesota to slightly-less-northern Minnesota.
Was it cold up there Margie?
Oh, you betcha. Yah.
So Grand Forks to Grand Rapids or there abouts eh?
Just about, yeah. Good ol' route 2.
Weird. It takes 6-7 hours to go from Minneapolis to the Canadian border.... So would you have been driving like Arrowhead to Morehead on back roads?
Nothing like driving for 10 hours and still not leaving California or Texas!
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.
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
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.
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.
Drive for like 200 hours and never leave Hawaii
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!
That's been banned now, right?
Yeah, quite a few attempts made during the pandemic is what I heard
The wild thing is that the pandemic record will likely stand for a VERY LONG time, if it is ever beaten.
Even then if it's like a zombie pandemic it's still not gonna happen with all those roaming corpses everywhere
It's always been illegal.
There is still a sign at the Portofino hotel in LA with the current record and it is definitely up to date.
It's always been banned. Just like pot.
In LA you have just completed your commute to and from work on a tuesday
And yet high-speed rail is a foreign concept
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.
Tijuana - San Diego
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.
Alien might be a better word, but foreign is very accurate
Lol try Belgium, where driving 20 minutes is a different dialect and 1-2 hours is a different language.
In Australia, you can FLY for 4 hours and still be in the same state.
I'm a Canadian living in Korea and sometimes have to explain to locals that the reason I've never been to Vancouver is because I lived on the opposite coast and it would take a week to drive there. In Korea, aside from a few outlying islands, you can never be more than four hours away from anywhere else in the country.
This is what most people on Lemmy don't understand when they complain about cars in North America. Texas and California combined are the size of all of Europe. America and Canada are very large. In most situations we do need cars to live a normal life.
Some countries in Europe, even small ones, have really crappy public transport so driving cars is still necessity. Poland and Ireland comes to mind.
Ireland is a lovely place but it really is a pain in the backside to get around as a non-resident.
The size of the country/states isn't really the issue, right? You can cross Europe via train pretty easily, 4hrs London to Amsterdam, longer over land than Dallas to San Antonio for example, but I'd assume a normal life doesn't regularly involve driving all around the state. Most of daily life is just within a city or region, the size of the country is irrelevant there.
There absolutely are major factors that basically force North Americans into cars, I agree, but I don't think size is an excuse for those factors.
edit: This video talks about the 'North America is too big' argument in detail, but fair warning, the creator is a bit annoyed and crass at the start and talking about comments they get. You can skip to 2:30 to jump over it.
I think a lot of it is historical. America and Canada had virtually unlimited land for growth, so everything just sprawled outward. In Europe you're crossing multiple countries to travel the continent like you said. Since space was always a concern, more thought has been put into the designs and layouts. There are enormous American cities with poor public transit, and even if they had good public transit, it would take a long time to go from one part of the city to another. We've seen thoughtful layouts and good public transportation in dense cities where it makes sense, like SF, NYC, and Seattle. Cars are convenient for urban and rural sprawl, and there wasn't a lot of motivation for alternatives until recently.
BTW, you can cross the United States in a train too, but it'll take you 79 hours.
Parts of it is historical, although it shouldn't be understated that a lot of it was political (in the sense of powerful business interests influencing policy to advance their economic interest) and poor urban planning forcing that sprawl. As the video mentions, public transit like trains and streetcars necessarily predated the advent of the mass produced automobile around 1930, a long time after the initial sprawling. Almost all cities had them, they were removed and not replaced.
What I mean by this is that even with the open colonial sprawl, the current state of things was avoidable and, although increasingly difficult, can be undone and improved.
Oh yes, there's definitely a political element to it, driven (no pun intended) by business desires. I just read on Lemmy today that Michelin Tire Company started reviewing restaurants and awarding stars hoping to motivate people to drive further for culinary experiences. Driving further meant more wear on their tires, and thus more profit. That's the kind of genius marketing plan that I don't see very often today, and is a great example of those business influences at work.
Some more fun anecdotes relating to car dependency.
In the US, one very well-known city planner would deliberately build overpasses too low for buses to go under them on routes to the beach, to prevent poor people (read: black people) from being able to go to the beach.
The notion of "jaywalking" is also invented whole-cloth by the car industry. Prior to that, streets were a place that people could walk or ride safely, cross wherever the want, or even just hang out and maybe just get out of the way if someone wants to get by. A "jay" was an insult sort of like "loser".
Their older history is not a significant factor in European cities being more walkable/cyclable. In fact, thanks to the impact of WWII, many European cities had to be rebuilt and are those in some ways younger than significant American, Canadian, and Australian cities. The Netherlands, often the posterchild of walkability and cyclability, was heading very much in the same direction as the US in the post-war period, up until the Stop de Kindermoord movement of the 1970s started a versal of that trend. And even then, it wasn't a complete 180. Government votes supportive of stopping the child murder only barely won out over car-dependency, and many local businesses and entrenched interests were just as staunchly opposed to improved design in the Netherlands as they so often are today in places like America and Australia.
It's definitely possible for car-dependent cities and countries to improve. It just requires people supportive of change to speak up. Convince others to also be supportive. Most importantly, contact your representatives and vote for people who can be convinced to do better.
I'd heard the Michelin story repeated a couple of times by a friend, and it sort of checks out. The Michelin Guide was originally more a general guide for French motorists in 1900, to increase said demand for driving and therefore their tires, although when the restaurant section became more popular, they started hiring anonymous reviewers in the 20s and then eventually awarding stars about 30 years after the initial publication.
1 star : "A very good restaurant in its category" (Une très bonne table dans sa catégorie) 2 stars : "Excellent cooking, worth a detour" (Table excellente, mérite un détour) 3 stars : "Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey" (Une des meilleures tables, vaut le voyage)
So it's not as if it was a masterminded plan, a decent marketing tool just sort of evolved into a restaurant reviewing guide.
London to Amsterdam is not very far though. That's like maybe halfway across the state I live in.
But, point taken. I still take the train occasionally... When it works!
Australia is roughly the size of continental USA, and I do fine without a car
Somewhere between 70-90% of Australia is uninhabited.
Where are you going with that? It's harder to get by without a car in lower density places...
Capital city?
These days, yeah, but I used to live in country town Australia, without a car or license then either. I admit, that was harder, and did limit my options, but the majority of people don't live in country towns in Australia or the US
this is such a fucking wild logic, why would the size of your country have any relationship whatsoever to needing a car? Do you think the moscow subway is worthless because siberia is in the same country?
Who in their right mind would even drive across the US? you'd take an airplane!
Because the historical availability of land influenced city development, leading to urban and rural sprawl.
Yeah, I'm similar, living almost in the middle of the west coast in Oregon, USA. I can drive 20 hours south and only change states once. That's traveling 65MPH+ most of the time.
Twice? There's at least four distinct accents between my house in north east London and my job in the south east of the city.
Tbf going from north east londin to south east london is like a 4 hour trip
someone's going to bring up the Elizabeth line and I'm going to shit myself in rage
Is the Elizabeth line a subway line? Cause my British friends claim that the surface rails are shit, but "the tube" is pretty fast.
Am American, so we pretend to have railways.
most of the tube is technically above ground
just when you're in London everyone loves to bring it up because it's the newest line
I think you should get a practice shit in so you're ready.
We can't stop here, this is bap country.
This is among the best comments I've read on Lemmy, perhaps even the best.
Welcome to cob land.
Things were better back when you could sail around the world for years and never leave the Kingdom.
I can drive 8 hours and still be in the same state. It’s weird, man.
(e: I mean no cities, avg 60mph the whole way. So weird.
You can drive 13 hours (no stops) and only get from one end of Texas to the other.
You can drive 15 hours and get from Imperial Beach, California, to Crescent City, California. Again, no stops.
I'll bet someone could figure out a 36 hour trip across Alaska
The trouble with Alaska is that driving is often impossible. Ketchikan to Anchorage is a 36 hour drive that goes through two Canadian provinces and that's only halfway across.
If you fell asleep at the beginning of a 4 hour drive where I live, and woke up at the end, odds are very very high that you wouldn't be able to tell any difference in the surroundings.
I-10 driving across Texas...
It's a shorter drive getting the San Diego, California to El Paso, Texas than from El Paso to Beaumont Texas on the same road.
Texas likes to flex this by having a sign right when you enter from Louisiana saying that El Paso was 895 miles away or something like that.
If you're in Los Angeles, you may not have left your county yet
only twice?
Yeah, the accent will change in the time it takes to get to the next village.
There are many states where you can drive more than 4 hours and not leave, but now I wonder about the reverse: what is the maximum number of states you can reach in a 4-hour drive?
Surely, the route has to be through many of the small states in New England. I think it would be tough to reach more than 5.
Without traffic you might be able to get Maine,new Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and maybe Pennsylvania, but that route would take you through/close to Boston and New York City, so there'll be traffic
I once spent 12 hours traveling across 3 states.
One state was gone in 3 hours, the next in about 5 MINUTES since it was just the tip, and the remaining 9 took me to the other side. Granted, at the time, the speed limit was 60 the entire way, and the vehicle was limited to 55 for the trailer.
Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania?
I was thinking Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia. Technically more like 15 minutes going through Hagerstown, MD but I'm not even from the area and just have a fascination with border quirks
The 9 hour state has to be either PA or TN, either that or they crossed the Mississippi River and cut across the tip of Missouri or Illinois. That last state has to be one of the bigger ones. I suppose Florida is also a 9 hour state
The mind boggles at the amount of unnecessary taxpayer money being spent to support Point Roberts.
Yes! My favorite part is that when they realized that it was south of the 49th parallel, Britain tried to see if they could just have it. Obviously that didn't happen.
Also, look up Angle Inlet.
No doubt you've seen this BBC website - https://www.bbc.com/travel/columns/places-that-dont-belong
I just discovered it today
I'm guessing Washington, Idaho, and Montana.
That panhandle is thicker than it appears. Takes an hour to drive across it.
Not when you drive Montana speeds. Montana is like a mini Texas.
But are Montana speeds legal in Idaho? Thought Idaho actually has a speed limit of 70
India: Drive for a few hours, completely different language, culture, food, dresscode.
If I drive for 4 hours, I may be two countries away.
Twice? Are you driving Stuart Little's car?
I just watched a similar segment on Taskmaster doing some regional American accents, everyone kind of defaulted to Texas
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.
And we Americans can't comprehend how every little metro area has its own distinct accent.
There are different accents in the US. Talk to people from Texas, Louisiana, Rhode Island, and California, they all sound different with the person from Louisiana probably being the most incomprehensible.
For that matter talk to someone from Dallas, TX and then someone from Tulsa, OK. That's only a 4 1/2 hour drive. They will both sound different. I'm pretty sure there's a different accent in Oklahoma City compared to Tulsa, and a different one in San Antonio compared to Dallas.
youre thinking about Cajun English, which is getting less and less common, and really is found in the southern parts of Louisiana. most louisiana residents not from deep in the bayou speak relatively comprehensibly.
Had to look up a Louisiana accent just to see, and it sounds a bit different in some unnameable way but still definitely just South. Aside from being able to pick out she must be from some nebulous southern state that wasn't NC, I think we could have gotten along fine.
Which I guess just means you and I wouldn't be able to communicate in person if I played up my childhood accent even a little. Which is fair. The day I introduced my first bf to my dad, I still vividly remember having to stand in as translator between them and I still don't understand how that happened. He was only one state up, and from a more rural area.
Slow your roll 'muricans. I got off a plane in Massachusetts and now I have to order my breakfast sandwich on whatever the fuck a bulkie is instead.
If I drive for 4 hours, I'd end up in the ocean.
We don't have that problem in the UK. Roundabouts.
You've made me wonder if it would be legal to spend 4 hours in a roundabout without taking an exit.
So there is not law or rule specifically about having to exit a roundabout. So in theory, yes you could. But you are likely to have the cops come ask you to leave before that, as that could possibly be seen as dangerous driving.
We don't have that problem in Sweden either. Not only do we have roundabouts, but we also have roads with turns in them.
When I tell American that it takes 6 hours of highway driving to leave my state they are flabbergasted. after 4 hours they might be in the same part of the country but they have probably crossed a few state lines.
Must be talking to east coasters, because there are plenty of US states where that's the case. My state is about 11 hours tall, and 4 hours wide.
A six hour drive is commonly just referred to as going up north for a long weekend.
Thank you for giving me my new default. This party mix of measuring systems sounds way more infuriating to tell people than "about five and a half CDs."
Canadian? Or Florida/Texas? Because the Americans that would have trouble understanding that are likely Northeasterners.
Australian, so about as reliable a source as a random picture on the internet.
This is how I learned Australia has states. Why the fuck do y'all have states? You're one single island with nothing in the middle! I legit thought Queensland was a county til right now!
Also. Why, in Queensland, is there a place called Texas! I'm going to come over there!
Quebec is eternal
Only if you go the wrong way on the only road in Canada.
Gatineau -> Natashquan, 1500km (~940 miles), you're still in the same province... For Europeans, in 1500km you can cross 4 or 5 countries.
Even better, Radisson -> Natashquan, 2200km lol, still in Québec
Canada has provinces and territories, not states.
I live in Alabama, and it takes a little over 6 hours of interstate travel at roughly 70mph to get to Florida, 5.5 hours if you just don’t stop at all. I can hit Georgia in about 2.5 hours. There is no reason to go to Mississippi, so I don’t know. And I think it’s about like 4.5 hours to Tennessee, but once again not many reasons to go there so I’m not sure.
Where are you that’s 4.5 hrs from Tennessee and 6 hours from Florida? I can hit the Florida line from Birmingham in about 3.5, and can be on Nashville in about the same… meaning I can drive from the Tennessee line to Florala in about 6 hours- and that’s the whole state lol.
I’m in Birmingham, but I have 2 kids and a fabled partner. I typed in my address to perdido key and got 5.5 hours nonstop. I used that as a reference because it’s right across the line, and there’s a good reason to be there. That’s why I made the joke of 6.5 hours or 5.5 hours if I don’t stop. I also mentioned that trip was interstate only. There are slightly faster ways to go, but involve leaving the interstate.
I also picked Perdido because when my mom kidnapped me when I was 5 and eventually legally divorced my dad. I had to make the trip every other weekend from Perdido to Birmingham. We would meet halfway in Greenville Alabama. Until I was 8. That’s when she died and I moved back to Birmingham permanently. So, Perdido is a place right across the state line that is familiar to me.
Then I qualified that trip to Tennessee with “I think”, because I am very poor, and just like Mississippi I have no reason to go there even if I had money enough to do so. The last time I went to Tennessee it took like 4.5 hours to get where I was going I think. But, unlike Florida I didn’t care enough to pick a point and actually type it into google maps to figure out the length of time it would take.
So, you caught me. I guesstimated one of my destinations.
EhehehahahahhAhahaAHAHAHAHAH!
TRY 12 HOURS NON-STOP MOTHERFUCKER. IT TAKES 12 HOURS TO GET FROM ONE SIDE OF MY STATE TO THE NEXT AT SPEEDS RANGING FROM 75MPH/120KM/H TO 90MPH/144KM/H
No, seriously, it's literally over 1,300km (approx 800mi) between Texarkana and El Paso (I believe that's the straight-line distance; it honestly takes longer than 10-ish hours to get from one side to the other without stopping for food, gas or bathrooms). You were probably talking to people from the tiny far-northern states.
I'm guessing Australia?
Really depends on where you are in the US. Northeast, yeah, the states there are relatively small. It takes 3.5 hours on an interstate highway to cross Ohio, a "middle-sized" state. Switch to state roads, and that time frame goes up dramatically.
Yeah Australia is slightly different to the US in that it's huge but there are very few people living here. Take the largest state: Western Australia which is literally 4 times the size of Texas. But do people drive from Adelaide (capital of South Australia) to Perth (capital of Western Australia)? No, not generally. It takes 28 hours of non-stop driving. And the thing is, there is hardly anything in between. This means you have to be careful about fuel stops and maybe even have a satellite phone. Look up the Nullarbor Plain of you're interested.
People "from the country" might drive several hours to visit relatives and you might drive 3-4 hours to go to a camping/holiday destination, but if you're headed to another major city, you are most likely going to fly.
The closest other capital city to Adelaide is Melbourne but that's still ~8 hours away by car. But there is a really nice scenic route called the Great Ocean Road which you would usually do over a a few days.
Why do you go on the internet and lie mate? I'm in Perth quite often pop over to radelaide for a frog cake at smoko. I would recommend anyone after a nice walk just give it a crack, it's like 15mins max. I think they put in a bike path recently too.
OP hasn't been to New Jersey.
The Jersey Shore accent is fake. Don't believe the MTV lies.
Hung out with one of these MTV reality TV stars. She got drunk and the accent was gone. She sounded like a normal person. It's entirely forced.
They're also not from Jersey. Or at least, I think most of them were from Long Island. I'm honestly not committed to remembering what few things I did at one point know about that show.
4 hours in Canada means you left Toronto and you're still in Toronto.
4 hours gets you almost to Sudbury, what are you smoking?
Sounds like you've never been to Toronto. You'll be lucky to get onto the highway in 4 hours.
You can drive from Buffalo to Toronto in less than 4 hours, and that includes the time it takes to cross the border. I've made the drive, and can confirm that it takes less than 4 hours.
2 hours? 30 minutes in some places.
Driving 2 hours in the UK doesn't really get you anywhere either.
Not a straight road in that country.
To be fair our cars can turn corners though.
It's an I threshing observation I had a. Boss yrs ago who shut down the woek for 3 weeks when he took his family to the Olympics in the states. The first thing he commented on was how boring it is to drive there when going any kind of distance due to massive long straight sections of roads
I think you mean the name for barms have changed twice!
Meanwhile in Canada, you'll be lucky to make it from one side of Toronto to the other.
There's probably a point in Toronto that is a closer drive to Ottawa than to the other end of Toronto.
ITT: americans bragging about having to pay absurd sums of money on a car so they can spend 4 hours per day driving to and from work, when in other countries that would be 2 hours on a train at like a 20th the cost
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.
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
What a braindead take, everything in the second panel 100% also applies to the first. In fact, the us is more diverse like are you fucking kidding me???