One more for the Grand Canyon, and only once you’ve actually wandered about it a little. The first time I looked out over the edge of the rim, the bigness wasn’t “real.” It was almost as though I were still looking at a photograph or postcard of the Canyon. It wasn’t until I saw it from multiple angles and traveled it a little that I came to get a sense of its real massiveness.
The tragically decorated Stone Mountain in Georgia was also larger than I thought, once I went to the top. It’s a smaller place than the Grand Canyon, obviously, but the size of the ‘rock’ was startling. Someday, I’d love to see Uluru, the worldwide champion of mountain-rocks.
The United States of America. If you come from a place with more, smaller nations (like, say, Europe) then it can take time to understand (more than intellectually) that there are individual states in the United States that take as long or longer to travel through than a single country elsewhere. Explaining to people visiting for the first time that no, you cannot take in NYC, the Grand Canyon and Los Angeles in a week is difficult. Yes, they are all in the same country, but it’s one big honking country. If you take it upon yourself to do a road trip cross country for whatever reason, it sinks in. Days of driving through the same scenery, watching it slowly transform into another and then another ecosystem, and it’s all really the “same place.” I’ve never driven long-distance through Canada, just visited on occasions, but I suspect the effect is even more pronounced with so many isolated and sparsely populated areas.
The comparison I would offer to Europeans is that the driving distance from New York City to Los Angeles is the same as the driving distance from London to Beirut.
Magnus Bäckstedt. It’s one thing reading that a pro cyclist is 6’ 4" and 207 lbs, but it’s quite another thing to see him in the flesh. Chapeau to the frame maker.
You know, I know this is true, this has been proven true, and everyone reports it as true.
But I’ve been stuck in traffic on the highway and looked at the lines at a standstill and they STILL don’t look near that long. I’m not saying I don’t believe this, I’m just having a hard time convincing myself it’s true
“The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.” --Earle Hitchner
The state of Alaska, it’s actually mind-numbingly huge, as in 2 x the size of Texas, one-fifth the size of the whole lower 48. Plus it’s achingly beautiful…
Australia’s good for that as well. The one that really rubbed it in for me was taking a 25 hour coach trip, pretty direct route, down a coastal road. That took me less than half way down one state. Not the biggest state either.
In fact, you can stick Australia on the list. It looks pretty small with the standard projection and it only has a couple of states; Alaska may be huge, but it’d only be the 3rd largest Australian state if it got bored and moved.
We get the same questions in Canada. (Can we go to Niagra Falls? …No.) I think Europeans have less need to grasp such a scale because, maybe, they’re less likely to have an aunt living 3,000 miles away.
My Dad’s new girlfriend is from Europe. She came to Canada to visit. My Dad lives at the edge of a lake. Anyway, we drove north from there for three hours and then reached a height of land with a view of a lake.
“Is that the lake where your house is?”
(!?!)
No concept.
Or, the forest fires that blanket 100s of thousands of square miles with smoke for weeks on end:
You see pictures like that and notice that the doors are not to human scale. But what isn’t immediately obvious is that at the top of the dome where the columns start, that’s an observation deck- and you can’t even see the people up there.
It’s ENOURMOUS, even by modern standards. And all the more amazing considering it’s 500+ years old.
“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” - Doug Adams
Exactly. If you look at the entirety of the earlier Apollo missions, it’s pretty obvious that each one was sort of a step further than the last.
Apollo 8 - went to the moon, orbited it, came home.
Apollo 9 - docked with the LEM, undocked with the LEM, etc…
Apollo 10 - dress rehearsal of landing, without actually landing.
Apollo 11 - landing, 2.5 hours EVA
Apollo 12,14-17 - full-on exploration, with EVA durations getting progressively longer- 7 hrs for Apollo 12, 9 for Apollo 14, 19 for Apollo 15, 20 hours for Apollo 16, and 22 for Apollo 17.
