Most astronauts haven’t been that far from home.
I’m actually confused now, is “rome” an alternative spelling of “roam” in some parts? Did I miss a pun? I’m not trying to correct the OP, I’m not a native speaker and genuinely curious.
No “rome” is not an alternative spelling of rome.
Its a pun because it is to intentional mispellings of roam.
Well all I can say is that that the lady is one anecodatal evidence for the idea that
“all roads lead to Rome !”… If all roads lead to Rome, there is no escape from Rome…
That’s that cleared up then. 
" ‘Happy is the nation that has no history’, " quoth Mark Rutherford “but I confess I should like a little more history here.”
Rutherford [ Mark Hale White ] barely travelled, despite working as a journalist in London when younger, living all his life in the confines of both English nonconformity and the geographical expression thereof ( Bedfordshire ) thence to London and Sussex. He would have met a lot of dreary MPs and dismal nonconformists.
George Moore, the Irish writer, on the other hand, despite being heir to a very nice house in Mayo, skipped to Paris as soon as he could, lived there and in London and Dublin etc… He met the intelligentsia of the day, French artists and writers, and cute girls.
Both are regarded as among the greatest writers of the English language.
One was comparatively wealthy ( guess which ); yet rich people, particularly women, have been constrained from both travel and enjoyment by family ties etc., so in the end opportunity and desire both come down to our old friend Chance. Neither adventurous travel ( or any other life-choice ) nor home-keeping are the least bit admirable or condemnable: they merely admit to then available options.
Which doesn’t mean those options are not regrettable in retrospect. Yet that applies to all.
It is a pun. “To roam or not to roam” is the intended reading, but “to [go to] Rome or not to [go to] Rome” means, metaphorically the same thing.
It’s actually one of the cleverest thread titles I’ve seen in a long time, if not ever.
That being said, never having travelled more than 30 miles from where you are born is bizarre weird.
Okay. Got it now. 
I see what you did there.
I grew up in a rural area that had lots of multi-generational, backwoods people both black and white. I remember when we were in junior high and high school, the field trips we took were the furthest away from home that some of the students had ever been and we are talking 20 -30 mile one-way trips. In some cases, it was the first time they had even seen the closest city or tall building and they lived less than 30 miles from one. We went to school in a border town right on the Louisiana/Texas border and the school itself was less than a mile from the border. There is a narrow river that serves as the border but you can walk across the bridge or even swim across it to be in another state. I remember one field trip in which a few people mentioned that it was the first time the had ever been to another state even though they could have walked there and back at any time in less an hour even if they didn’t have access to any vehicle but somehow that never came up. This was in the late 1980’s, not 1920.
You run into that type of thing in weird places though. I have a college educated coworker who has not only never been out of New England, he has also never been to all the states in New England. He told me his full count was Massachusetts, Southern Maine and somewhere just across the New Hampshire border (in other words, never more than about an hour’s driving radius from his home). One of my supervisors in Ohio is in his late 30’s and had never been on a plane before until he had to fly to meet me and a few other people.
I grew up in a rural area that multi-generational really backwoods people both black and white. I remember when we were in junior high and high school, the field trips we took were the furthest away from home that some of the students had ever been and we are talking 20 -30 mile one-way trips. In some cases, it was the first time they had even seen the closest city or tall building and they lived less than 30 miles from one.
We went to school in a border town right on the Louisiana/Texas border and the school itself was less than a mile from the border. There is a narrow river that serves as the border but you can walk across the bridge or even swim across it to be in another state like most people did routinely. I remember one field trip in which a few people mentioned that it was the first time they had ever been to another state even though they could have walked there and back at any time in less an hour even if they didn’t have access to any vehicle but somehow that never came up.
You run into that type of thing in weird places though. I have a college educated coworker who has not only never been out of New England, he has also never been to all the states in New England. He told me his full count is Massachusetts, Southern Maine and somewhere just across the New Hampshire border (in other words, never more than about an hour’s driving radius from his home and he is in his late 40’s). One of my supervisors in Ohio is in his late 30’s and had never been on a plane before until he had to fly to meet me and a few other people.
I think recent archeological research indicates that all roads actually lead *away from *Rome.
It is even funnier if you have been to Concord and Walden Pond. Concord is a very nice town but it is not that big and it is just a desirable Boston area suburb these days. Walden Pond is just a fairly pretty but non-descript pond just like thousands of others across New England (it is a state park today so anyone can go there). It is in Concord proper and just a short walk from the small downtown area that featured inns, taverns and restaurants and lots of other types of retail establishments even back in Thoreau’s Day.
I think lots of people get the wrong impression with they read his works today. He didn’t flee civilization or live in the wilderness on his own. He just built a vacation retreat (a man-cave in today’s terms) and made the short walk back and forth from the town center as the mood struck. I have no idea why that was considered notable or innovative at the time. He was a talented writer and naturalist but he was certainly no wilderness explorer or survival expert.
You mean we’ve been taking them the wrong way the whole time ?! No wonder there’s so many accidents !
+1
In my area, the average daily commute approaches 30 miles. It would take a lot of hard work NOT to travel 30 miles from home on at least a a monthly basis, let alone a lifetime.
I have been to 3rd world countries where it is not unusual for someone to have never been more than a half day’s walk from the village where they were born, but not so much here.
I was watching some doc. on TV about an area of (the beautiful and wonderful) Yunnan, China which was about to be flooded for a dam. Some activists intended to show the locals that the promises the gov’t was making to relocate them was just rhetoric. To prove it, they hired a bus to take some villagers some miles away to a place where displaced villagers were living out in the open, and along the roadsides, in poverty. Not one of the villagers on the bus had ever been outside of their own tiny village, and not one was younger than 50 years or more. The look of amazement on their faces at simply seeing the countryside was truly remarkable.
Strange travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
– Bokonon
If nothing else, going elsewhere can let you gauge the qualities of your hometown - having holidayed in (or rather, endured) Morocco for instance, I now know there are places full of more irritating people than England.
The enormous value put on ‘travelling’ does rankle though; many seasoned travellers seem to have only ‘learnt’ an inflated sense of self-importance from their thinly-veiled poverty tourism.
Well that’s fine for him, but what do we jet-setters do now that its been grounded?
In most of Spain people would consider that the upper limit for a daily commute; my clients in the Dunkirk area had a coworker whose commute was closer to 50 miles and it was held as highly unusual (he didn’t move or get a weekdays rental because of his wife - once you get a “sigh my wife” answer you don’t keep asking).
But still, I grew up in a place that’s 60 miles from two larger towns that get thousands of visitors every year; there are people there who have never been to either of those two towns but they’re rare (I can name two). In a larger urban area such as Madrid or Barcelona it’s a lot more common (and you also meet a lot more people who have never visited their own town’s tourist attractions). My grandmother’s old folks home took the residents to eat out of town recently and over half the bus (discounting people with serious memory trouble) had never seen many of the tourist attractions and landmarks Grandma could recite, tell the story of, had visited… she has nephews who’ve never visited the Old Town, same family, completely different interests. If you discount “going to the same beach every year” from “more than 30 miles away”, the numbers for homebodies rise even higher.
Is it my cup of tea? No, I come from several long lines of roamers and I’m one myself. But so long as I’m happy like this and they’re happy like that, hey, more happiness is a good thing!