And Amarillo, Texas is closer to both Salt Lake City, Utah and Phoenix, Arizona than it is to Brownsville, Texas.
Of course it does. It’s in Pennsylvania.
I live very close to a region in Missouri where a person can be in 4 other states (IL, KY, TN, AR) within a easy one hour drive.
I think the only similar spot in the US would be a little north of NYC in New York State where a person can be in MA, CT, NJ, and PA.
So are Indiana and California. They have universities there, too.
Texarkana, TX is closer to Chicago than to El Paso, TX.
One time (just to kill time) I went to one of the map sites and calculated a trip from the bottom left corner of Maine to the point where RI, CT and MA meet, to the VT, NH, MA point and back to SW ME. The trip takes like 6 hours – an afternoon! You can do New England in an afternoon!
Technically, Mississippi is only a couple of hours from Missouri’s bootheel.
If you start in Wyckliffe, KY, you can be in 6 states and make it back in about 6 hours.
Wickcliffe => Cairo, IL => Charleston MO => Blytheville, AR => Memphis TN => Southhaven, MS => Return Same way (or take US51 North from Memphis)
Yes, Mississippi is less than a 3 hour drive from Cairo IL.
Texas geography is nearly another topic unto itself. My favorite? The Horcón Tract in Tamaulipas, Mexico. Turns out everyone born there between 1906 and 1977 was probably a U.S. citizen. You can still see where it was on many map pages. Link.
A comparison I once used to describe to a British poster the size of the United States in European terms - Seattle and Miami are as far apart as London and Tehran.
Similarly, I once pointed out to a German that if he got in a train heading east for six hours, he would end up on the other side of the former Iron Curtain. I would end up in La Pocatière.
I’ve run into things like this even within New York. I grew up in Plattsburgh in northern NY. When I lived downstate, people used to say things like “I knew a guy from Watertown. He used to go to a bar called Murphey’s. Did you ever go there?”
No, I didn’t. Plattsburgh and Watertown are admittedly both in northern NY but they’re about 150 miles apart. Me going to a bar in Watertown would be like someone in Manhattan going to a bar in Baltimore.
Not that this thread would be the place for it (if it is, fire away), but I have thought it might be fun to compare each USA state, both area and population, with foreign countries, just for comparison’s sake. I may have it wrong in my memory, and I’m going to check as soon as I post this, that England (maybe it’s Britain) is close to the size of Alabama.
Another thing like that that I remember hearing somewhere along the way, “There are as many African-Americans in my apartment complex as there are in Vermont.”
I’ll be back once I find the right source for such things online.
It didn’t take long to see that Wikipedia has lists for the area comparison thing:
Now it’s just a matter of finding the comparisons!
Obviously my memory is bad as far as the UK goes. It’s between Texas and California in area. England itself is between Montana and New Mexico in area.
As for the African-American Vermont thing, it would need to be a good-sized apartment complex. In the range of 3,600 people.
There are more 7-Eleven’s in my hometown than there are in Vermont.
There are more Starbuck’s on Third Avenue in Manhattan than there are in Vermont.
We drove through Vermont on our way from Upstate New York to Maine. Beautiful state.
Here’s one such site:
http://www.insidervlv.com/landmass.html
Quick Texas trivia:
The longest straight line distance is from the northwest corner of the panhandle to the Rio Grande just below Brownsville, 801 mi.
El Paso, in the western corner of the state, is closer to San Diego, California than to Beaumont, near the Louisiana state line.
Beaumont, is closer to Jacksonville, Florida than it is to El Paso.
Texarkana, in the northeastern corner of the state, is about the same distance from Chicago, Illinois as it is to El Paso.
And:
Dalhart, in the northwestern corner of the state, is closer to the state capitals of Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Wyoming than it is to Austin, its own state capital.
A dream deferred, but surely not forsaken yet. I’m confident that Hawaii is busy still looking for some other way to accomplish this.
Vermont and New Hampshire combined are smaller than San Bernadino County…Is that what you mean?
Sure, that works. Just anything in the “Gee Whiz” zone for sizes and numbers of people and oddities of other types.
Isn’t San Bernardino the biggest county in the USA? Or is it the lower 48?
Yeah, we have trains like that too. 
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