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In the US, there's a good chance you haven't even left your state either
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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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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"
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Or even at night. Lotta these highways though just a straight line can be real dangerous.
Yeah the Karen migrations are rough.
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.
Cruise control is fine on motorways, but that doesn't mean you can relax when you're still surrounded by other vehicles also going at 70mph!
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.
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.