Oh wow I spent more time on the maps then I did on the drawing of Jim. OH WELL.
This comes from every European exchange student I met in High School and most European international students I knew in college who said when they saw Springfield on a map they were excited because it looked really close to a bunch of rad cities like Kansas City and St. Louis and Chicago. However, they didn’t realize how spread out cities in America are compared to Europe, and when they discovered that Chicago is actually a 6 hour trainride away (with a 4+ hour car ride to St. Louis first) they were not happy to be stuck in the middle of flippin’ nowhere.
AS IS JIM.
35 Comments
All that means is that you are better at drawing your characters then you are at drawing maps.
Yeeeah. That happened to my roommate’s cousins in college. They came over to visit her from England to the middle of no where Texas, and thought the other states were just a joy ride by looking at the map. They found out just how desolate Texas can be. Love the state, but geez, its spread out.
There’s an old rhyme that goes something like this:
“The sun has riz, the sun has set,
And here we is, in Texas yet.”
West Texas: Miles and Miles of nothing but Miles and Miles. (and I seriously love it here….!)
Yeeeep. You tell people “I need to drive to Dallas”, and they assume this is just a quick hop, because it’s in the same state. Then you say it’s 4 hours, and they’re confused, because it looked so close on the map.
Are there city officials who know of the supernatural community or are part of? for example the mayor of new york is secretly one bad-ass bugbear?
I cannot stand 1 1/2 hour drives here in NZ. I wouldn’t not survive either of these places.
You should just fly everywhere Jim! What, too slow? Tiring? Bah. :[
i live in the detroit area. when some relatives came to visit from ireland, they had plans to “drive to california over the weekend and see what san francisco and los angeles were like”.
A lot of Europeans just don’t realize just how huge this country is. They’re used to things being compact close together, easy to get to by train as well. Here? Nope.
having recently returned from visiting family in WVa (I’m in SE Virginia)….. all i have to say is….. yep. 400 miles, just to see the extended family
That’s an interesting perspective I didn’t think about. It always took me 14 hours just to visit my grandparents from VA to St. Louis, MO.
I’m curious what will come next.
Ha! That’s a genuinely easy mistake for someone from a smaller country to make! We had friends in Scotland asking us why we didn’t go to such-and-such a place. We’d be like “Well, we live in South Dakota and all the places you’re talking about are at least a day or more drive away and several hours via plane.” They got this kind of shocked look on their faces and then proceeded to talk about how close everything was and how could Americans afford to go any place when things were always so far away?!
Even people inside the US make that mistake about Texas. I live in Austin and a while back, a friend from Missouri emailed me and was like “Hey! I’m going to be in Tulsa next week, do you think you can drive up and meet me?” I had to be like “Umm, no, I can’t do that, because it’s an eight hour drive.” Just getting out of Texas is something like five hours!
Kind of depends on WHERE you live in Texas, doesn’t it? For me, Arkansas is 5 minutes away. Shreveport, Arkansas is just 30 minutes away, and Broken Bow, Oklahoma about an hour away.
(I live in Texarkana. “State Line Avenue” is literally the state line.)
(Shreveport Arkansas? WTF? That was supposed to say Shreveport Louisiana.)
Here in Denmark, you can easily drive from one end of the country to the opposite in less than 6 hours. Maybe this is why they teach us geography as studiously as they do, so we don’t make the same mistake :D
When I was in England, people kept asking me how close I lived to my cousins when I’d mention they lived in Denver. I’d always say, “Oh, they’re not far. It’s only like… 6 hours about.” They’d give me these shocked and horrified looks and then say, “That’s “not far”?!”. I’d always respond with, “Well, we have to drive 9 hours to get to my grandparents…” they’d remark on where you could get in 9 hours driving from where we all lived in Sheffield. Actually, I once sat with a friend and we figured out that you could get from pretty far north to the southern coast in the same time it’d take you to go from New Mexico’s northern border to it’s southern border. Good times!
For answering “How far can I get? questions, I’d recommend:
http://www.freemaptools.com/how-far-can-i-travel.htm
It works worldwide, and you can pick to check either total distance or how fast you’d be going and how long it would take.
It took my folks and I about… seven or 8 hours to get from where I live in south central Pennsylvania out to Aldan (a suburb, kind of, of Philadelphia), and that was on the Pa Turnpike. Though, we usually hit the rest stops in between because we’d have to pee by the time we got to them.
This reminds me of a joke.
“The English make fun of Americans for thinking 100 years is a long time.”
“Americans make fun of the English for thinking 100 miles is a long distance.”
Same thing happens here in Oz, often Americans as well as Europeans arrive over here with every intention of doing a round trip drive of the whole East Coast or even through one of the deserts. It can get really tough to explain to them why that’s a bad idea… and then to explain to them why they need to carry extra fuel…
Yeah… In the US we’re used to long distance travel by car, but then again we’re also used to living in a fork-off huge country that actually has people living throughout it, little blink-and-you-miss-’em towns every 15-30 miles or so. We’ve just not considered the fact of Australia being just small enough that it’s more convenient to build big cities along the coasts and service them by sea but just big enough that you can DIE going overland without special preparations.
Speaking as one who has actually driven (or been driven since I was a tiny teen at the time) from California to Virginia… It takes a little less than a work week to do. If, y’know, you don’t want to stay up all night driving.
If you DO…. It takes two days.
For realz. Roughly 48 hours of driving to get across the country.
AND THEN YOU THINK OF PIONEERS. And you wonder how bad the relatives must be to make you want to get to California in the first place. I WOULD HAVE WAITED TIL THEY INVENTED TRAINS.
LOL it actualy shocks me to learn some people never been outside of the city let-alone the Provence. To me a six hour drive is a walk in the park. I regularly make a fifteen hour drive to visit a friend. To me US cities seem squished together I’m used to major cities being at leasta couple hours apart. But the I’ve just visited costal US cities mostly where two cities can be dvided bya single street
Holy shit. He has no idea how long it takes to get anywhere in the U.S.
My friend and I once drove from Los Angeles all the way to some little town up in southern Oregon called Brookings. It took us 14 hours to get there, with only bathroom stops. Longest. Car ride. Ever.
Heh. I’ve had the opposite culture-shock experience: moving to Germany from the US and finding out how *close* everything is in Europe. Man, we went EVERYWHERE we could afford to drive to– Wales, France, England, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria… It was great, you could hit three countries in a day easy.
Once while living in Florida I and some friends drove all the way to Pennsylvania in 29 hours straight, swapping off drivers so everybody got at least a few hours sleep. Driving across Europe was a snap compared to that.
That’s why americans are known to make european tours with all capital cities, but only spending on day/night in each as if it’d make sense to spend much time travelling and little vitising….
My brother recently graduated from the marines basic training. We live in southern nebraska. We had to drive for two days straight to reach him in san diego California. After he got back, he got married and moved to north Carolina. The UK has it easy…
I remember witnessing a different confusion of foreigners. As a student at University of Washington, in Seattle, I met some foreign students who thought they were going to the nation’s capital. Instead, they found themselves in the good Washington.
Regarding the Alt-text… I’m sure Jim would make a nice, bright and colorful cookie or crayon with his coloring. But he isn’t the brightest lightbulb in the bunch.
I once had to explain to a British friend that I couldn’t just take a train to visit a friend in Seattle because of the sheer distance involved. They don’t understand just how big the continental United States is.
Jim should have picked Dallas. I-20, I-35, and I-45 all pass through there.
Or even Texarkana, now that we have a full four-year university. Texarkana was built as a transportation hub for the trains. In addition to that, we have I-30, I-49, and I-69, as well as U.S. highways 59, 67, 71, and 82.
Jim…this is the reason why maps have scales printed on them.
Had an online friend who was visiting another friend over in Maryland, I was in Oklahoma at the time. He made this exact same mistake. Wanted to visit Florida, California, me, and a friend down in Texas. He was only going to be here four days. Got over here, pretty much stayed in the Maryland area. Haha.
Many moons ago, when I was an exchange student in Germany, I heard about a popular type of day-trip loop. As the day progresses, you eat each meal in a different country.