I can’t believe I never hit the odometer on my car in high school. I guess it just didn’t seem out of the ordinary how far it was. But looking back, and especially now that I live in a city where I seem to pass a school every few blocks, it seems absurdly far. So I decided to Mapquest it.
I grew up in semi-rural NC, outside of Charlotte. According to Mapquest, from my house to the public high school I went to was 14.57 miles.
But, after my sophomore year, I elected to drive myself to a better school so that I could get a real education. According to Mapquest, from my front door, that school was . . . drumroll, please . . . 32.17 miles away.
I lived in the country. The only way to get to my High School was on a school-provided bus. It took half an hour each morning and afternoon to go 18km / 11 miles.
But where I lived, everything was far away. Especially the rest of the world.
As a driving route I lived about 25 miles away from my high school. I just found that out now because I’d never driven it. I went to a Jesuit high school in Manhattan and I lived on Long Island. There are weird laws in NY about driving under the age of 18 or 17 so I had to take the train and bus/subway everyday.
Commute time to school was about 1hr40min. First class was at 8:50 and I had to leave the house by 6:41 (because the next train would only sometimes get me to school on time). Coming home it was a different story. I could get to Penn Station 20sec after the last train left and have to wait another 20, 30, 40min until the next. All told I probably spent about 4 hours a day commuting.
Oh, and the local high school would have been about a 5 minute walk.
The HS was about seven miles away in a busy city. It took three buses to get there if I did not have a ride. It was after HS that I learned I could have run the distance in less time, but that would be without all the books.
For most of my high school, I lived about 4 miles away from the school. I could have travelled by bus, but usually I took a train for 3 of the 4 miles.
However, for my second last year of high school, I lived in London, England, while the school that I was enrolled in was in Sydney, Australia – the New South Wales Correspondence School. So I lived about 12,000 miles from school, and received lessons by mail. I doubt if anyone can beat that.
I went to two different private high schools. One was 4.8 miles away and I was given a ride every morning, and got there in about 15 minutes. The other was 6.9 miles and I took a bus, which took more than an hour.
Google Maps says it was .9 mi. Looks like it’s taking me to the corner of the lot. The building is set back quite a ways, so it’s probably an entire mile.
I would have guessed two miles. Internet map sites show that it was about 1.5. I didn’t have a car, and parking was scarce, so I walked home, often with an armload of books and my trumpet in a case.
I’m guessing right at a mile. There was an elementary school that I didn’t attend (I had already graduated one in the town we had moved from) across the street and the junior high school (grades 7-9) that I did attend was more like 1/2 to 3/4 mile to the southwest. The high school was in that same direction but another couple blocks.
I walked or rode a bicycle to jr. high and walked or caught a car ride from a friend to high school. It was uncool to ride a bike to high school. It was also uncool to walk, but I was uncool anyway.
I feel your pain. While my trip to HS (also a better one that I attended in preference to my default local one) was only 13+ miles away by surface road as given by Google Maps, it took me 75 minutes in the best case scenario to get there every morning, and a like amount of time to get back. (Often it took me 90 minutes, and once or twice a year, 2 hours.) This is because I had to take a NYC bus to a subway and transfer twice. Yeesh. Any heavy rainfall or snow meant the buses ran badly at a minimum, plus train delays, sick passengers, track fires, police actions, you name it I’ve seen it (including someone pulling a knife on someone else in a crowded train feel-up gone bad, but no stabbing).
I never had 7am classes, but 8am classes were bad. I got up at 6am for those and skipped various traditional components of the morning ritual in favor of a few minutes more of sleep (I’ll spare you the details).
6 Km (3.75 miles) from the farm to the school. Some days with a tuba, a guitar and an amp. Now that I have kids of my own, I understand why my Mum was so pissed off when I blew my first driver’s exam…
It was about a half mile walk to the edge of the property and about another half mile to get to the building and probably another quarter mile within the building to get to homeroom.
I think the designer was daft - the school was about two miles from O’Hare airport, so building a school that’s shaped like an airport terminal was only asking for someone to land on the football field.