Europeans think 100 miles is a long way, Americans think 100 years is a long time
“We’ve redecorated this building to how it looked over 50 years ago!”
Favourite fuckin comedian
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.
Suprise! Don’t you want to know what’s your gift?
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”
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.
Why do Americans always do this weird almost-brag about this stuff?
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.
That sounds horrible
that’s uh, that’s not healthy. 1 hour each way is just about the maximum daily commute that is sane.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is a story of a guy in England who sent a letter to his friend in Los Angeles. He asked him to “pop in” to New York City to see how his daughter is doing.
The LA guy wrote back and said it would be faster if he went himself.
I really don’t think Euros have a solid grasp of the scale of the US.
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
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)
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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
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.
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.
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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.
I read that story in a book about the history of England: English history made brief, irreverent, and pleasurable.
The letter was from the 1800s I believe so maybe we can cut him some slack for not really knowing.
Ah right yeah fair enough! I thought you meant it happened in the past 15 years or something!
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.
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.
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:
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 once drove for 10 hours in the UK and was still in the same town! That magic roundabout is very confusing.
Pff in Australia I can travel over 2000km in a straight line and never leave my state, and it’s not even the biggest.
Now we need somebody from Siberia to tell us how they can drive for 5000km and never leave their federal subject (I had to look that up, it’s what the different regions of Russia are called)
I’m not Siberian, but from what I’ve gathered from the talks of people who lived there, is that people in far east Russia have a weird sense of time and distance. You might be in in the middle of fuck nowhere with the closest living person being like a 100km away from you, but when you call them with some any dumb questions like “Hey do you happen to have a bottle opener?” they respond with “Sure, I’ll be there shortly” and then they do indeed arrive… in 4 hours. It’s as if they don’t have places to be, and it’s totally okay for them to spend an entire day driving to a shop or to friend to lend them a screwdriver. It’s especially baffling to people who lived their entire lives within ~40km Moscow’s ring road and they hear stuff like “Minsk? Sure, that’s like a hand’s reach away - only 720 kilometers. I’ll drop by on the weekend”.
You can drive for four hours and still be on I-5 in LA.
Yeah, define ‘driving’ lol
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.
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.
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?
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only braking for food and bathrooms
only breaking for food and bathrooms
bathrroms> (Because I can’t spell either)
Nope, everyone in Texas drives like we’re playing Burnout: Revenge
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
Here’s a crazy alternative: railway.
Oh right. You guys don’t have that.
Even with rails it can be slow ass fuck. I took the train from LA Union station to Seattle and that took I want to say a day and a half. Standard stop and go maybe it couldve been faster if ot was more direct but even then at most youd probably only shave off maybe 4 hours at max. Its an 18 hr drive.
So take a train at night and get some sleep? That’s usually how rest of the world deals with long distance travel. Plus, not driving for 18 hours sounds a much better alternative in any scenario.
Dude I left at fucking 8 in the morning from LA and didnt get to seattle till like 5 in the afternoon the nex day. The problem for me though is that I had nothing to focus on, I dont have such problems driving. Also the train only left in the morning, so yeah. 34 hour trip is fucking horrible.
Nah. Just take like 4 Ambien and sleep for that entire 34 hour train ride.
I drove Seattle to LA over the summer. Did it over two days. It wasn’t pleasant per se. But I got to sleep in a real bed. Took an impromptu trip to San Jose (Winchester house). Found some good taco trucks. And still got there in half the time a train would. The train just doesn’t make sense for us, not on long trips at least.
Yeah without some major improvements they just trains are only viable for say Redlands to LA. People seem to forget just how fucken big the US is, California alone is larger the Britain FFS.
Also I wish I could take sleeping pills, but between the Autism and my bodies resistences they just make me pissy.
Drive for like 200 hours and never leave Hawaii
In LA you have just completed your commute to and from work on a tuesday
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That’s been banned now, right?
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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.
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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 banned. Just like pot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s dozens of us out in the fields, dozens of us!
