Indeed. Just going to Baltimore from DC can be a nightmare. OTOH the drive from DC to Atlanta is downright delightful.
On a business trip last year I was stuck in Wilmington over a weekend. Not wanting to stay in Wilmington I hopped in the rental car and just started driving early Saturday morning. By the time I returned to the hotel Sunday evening I had been in:
Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, through New Hampshire again, Vermont on the way out and then through them all again except New Hampshire and Maine) on the way back to Wilmington.
Having always lived on the West Coast where states are all growed up to man sizes it was kind of fun in a stupid way to blink and be in another state.
Well, not quite all. Washington state is about the size of the larger east coast states. Consequently, you can drive from Portland to Seattle in 3 hours.
I beg to differ. Depends on the day and time. I-95 south of DC is often a 50 mile long parking lot.
If you were bred in the west you’re just a crumb out here 
And also, it’s very easy to cross state lines casually and without much thought. Sometimes you can even miss the fact that you crossed between, say, MD and DE or MD and PA until you notice that the road signs have a slightly different styling to them.
Major roads will usually have a sign welcoming you to the state, though.
True, though once you hit Seattle you’ve only gone a bit more than halfway through the state and still have another 120 miles or so to the Canadian border. I grew up in Washington so moving to California was still a big upgrade.
But even though Washington is one of the smaller states west of the Mississippi (Hawaii, Iowa, South Dakota and Oklahoma are smaller), it is still larger than every state east of the Mississippi except Michigan (which only comes out ahead because it has a 36,000 sq. miles of water territory in the Great Lakes).
It is 30% larger than New York, 32% bigger than North Carolina, and 55% larger than Pennsylvania. Florida (WA is only 8% larger) is the only eastern states to get within the area of Maryland of Washington.
I drive from Washington State to Texas once or twice a year. It is a 2000 mile drive one way and I only drive through 7 states. Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas. Along that route, I only drive through 2 major Metropolitan areas (Spokane & Denver) and maybe 6? smaller cities (Missoula, Billings, Cheyenne, etc.)
I have also driven from Washington State to Baltimore. The further East I drove, the closer together things got until I felt like I was in one huge metropolitan area where the city never stopped, and one city/state just kind of morphed into another.
And if you’re leaving New Jersey, your wallet will know about it, normally.
This year, on my annual trip to family in NJ, I used I-78/I-81/I-77 instead of I-95 for my return leg. The Penn. leg is a bit slow, but once you get into the Virginia’s it’s pretty smooth sailing, and more scenic too.
Baltimore is not adjacent to or even really close to a state line (by East Coast standards) - it is in the middle of Maryland. But DC (Borders VA and MD), NY (borders NJ and CT), Philly (Borders NJ and is really close to DE and MD), Wilmington, DE (near MD and PA)
Also, there are several Metropolitan Areas that consist of two cities on opposite sides of a state line - examples are (New York and Newark, NJ), (Philadelphia, Camden, NJ, and Wilmington, DE, a good Tri-state example), (DC, Arlington, VA and Alexandria, VA).
So, someone can live in Wilmington, DE and commute to Camden, NJ, or live in Philadelphia, PA and commute to Wilmington, DE, etc.
Well, once you get 50+ miles south of DC, that is… that first 50 miles can be pretty horrifying (we’ve had it take 2+ hours). Anywhere south of there, and the population density drops enough that it’s mostly rural with relatively few urban bits.
We drove to Florida last spring. Broke the drive up over several days. I told people “we’ll drive 6 hours. And whether that gets us to Lorton” (DC suburb, 5 miles away from home " or Fayetteville" (2/3 of the way through North Carolina) “is yet to be seen”.
They thought I was joking.
I wasn’t.
As it turned out, we had astoundingly good luck… made Fayetteville… then got stuck the next morning in a 2-hour jam south of Fayetteville! That was unusual though - some kind of traffic accident that shut down the entire highway.
Anyway - this whole discussion reminds me of stories I’ve heard of people visiting from Europe, who are used to having entire other countries within a day’s drive. Even us dense-population Easterners have trouble wrapping our brains around that.
Well yeah - but that stretch still counts as NoVA, in my mind. I don’t consider myself out of Northern Virginia until I pass Fredericksburg, and then the traffic is usually not that bad. Sometimes there are backups around Richmond, but not nearly of the quality and thoroughness of the ones we grow further north :).
Pretty much every place in Maryland can be considered as effectively adjacent to a state border.
Arrive at Baltimore Airport at night after a delayed flight and take a shuttle to a hotel in Bethesda before you can go to bed and then tell me how close Baltimore is to the state border.
Yeah, well that’s an artifact of the time-space-continuum warping caused by airline delays :D. I doubt there’s any part of Maryland that is more than 100 miles from a state line somewhere.
But I feel your pain! That can NOT have been a fun evening.
We once landed in Philadelphia after a flight direct from San Diego. The plane was supposed to be on the ground for 30ish minutes, then take off and land again at National Airport just outside Washington DC. Well, they decided something was Very Wrong… and we wound up getting bussed the rest of the way. 135 miles… accomplished by a bus driver who was apparently in a hell of a hurry (I seriously thought about calling 911 on my cell and asking the police to pull the bus over). 5 states (counting DC as a “state”), in 2.5 hours… and it seemed far, far longer.
I don’t see the problem with that pace. If you average 55MPH, you should certainly be able to travel 135 miles in 2.5 hours.
Having lived in Maryland many years I was skeptical of the claim, but looking at a map I see that Baltimore is roughly 35 miles from DC, and the same distance to the PA border. The farthest you can get from a state border in Maryland (eyeballing it) looks to be Tilghman Island.
You can certainly drive hundreds of miles and still be in Maryland, and your trip on the Baltimore *and *the Capital Beltways in the same trip can be a nightmare.
Imagine a large portion of that being on surface streets with traffic lights… and one rest stop for 20ish minutes because they wouldn’t give people time to use the bathroom before they left (and we were afraid they’d leave without us)… so the bus was probably averaging 80 or more on the highway portion of the trip.
And it was raining which meant it was extra exciting.
Go south on Route 1 from Lewes Delaware to the Coastal Highway, connect to rt 13 to Cape Charles and take the Chesapeake bay bridge tunnel to Virginia beach and keep going south to the outer banks. That’s a spectacular drive down the East Coast, specially when you get to NC.