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Originally Posted by Hitch
LOL. I recall when my mother and some other family members came out to see me, in AZ.
She came from the TriState area (in the USA, NY, NJ, Connecticut), and that's her primary frame of reference. That and Europe, for her college work. In the US, you can pretty much drive from NJ to Washington, DC, in about 3 hrs, 45 minutes, if you take the I-95S. Natch, she assumed that driving times--or, I guess, the expectation of how far one would go--were similar, here.
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I went to the World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, CA one year. I had an exchange in email with one of the convention organizers, and it was quite clear that folks on the Left Coast have a different notion of "close by" than folks from the Northeast. I live in NYC, and for me, "close by" is a few blocks walk. Out there, "close by" is a couple of hours
drive.
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So, she and the other harridans (aka inside the fam as the Geriatric Buccanneers) took their rental car, drove from my home to Sedona, and were all proud of themselves. (About...1.5-2 hours). After that daytrip, they decided that they were going to DRIVE to the Grand Canyon, and that's when I interceded, saying "nope, not gonna happen." Suffice to say, Mother was pissed about being thwarted.
Anyway...I ended up getting a plane, and flying them from Scottsdale to the Canyon, and over it. I forget the flight time, but when we were substantially away from the Metro area, I pointed her view out the windscreens/windows and said "see that? That vast nothing? THAT is what I didn't want you three driving through." Once she saw that literally, you could see NO sign of civilization as far as the eye could see, in a bloody airplane, mind you, she decided that perhaps, I'd been right about it. (Not to mention--there is no such thing as actually appreciating the Canyon, from the ground. You have to see it from the air to really grasp its size.)
She couldn't believe that you could drive 3.5-5 hours, and STILL not leave the state. (n.b. of course, most people forget how large NY state really is, but that's for another day.) :-)
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I had a discussion with a friend about that, who sometimes goes to the Catskills. A friend of my SO and I owns property upstate, and takes us along for company and moral support when she has property issues to deal with. I talked about getting there by taking I-87 west and then north to route 11. The alternative was north and then west. There
is no straight-forward diagonal route. There's this thing called the Adirondack Park Preserve in the way...
A co-worker decades ago had been stationed in the Army at a base in Texas. He and a couple of his squad mates drew three day pass, signed out a jeep, and were going to a local town to hit the bars and get plastered.
They managed to make an epic wrong turn
somewhere. They
did eventually reach a town with the name of the one they were looking for, but this one was in
Kansas, not Texas. They had an interesting time explaining to their company First Sergeant just
why they were several days late getting back from their pass...
(It was during the Vietnam War era. I suspect some primo Vietnamese weed might have had something to do with how they managed to get to right town/wrong state.)
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Dennis