“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
Misawa, Japan. I lived there for about a year when I was growing up. It was a very long plane ride from San Antonio, TX. It would be even farther from Washington DC where I currently live. BTW, I have lived on both coasts and several places in between.
Incidently, I was deported from Japan at 11 years old because my father would not renew my visa. Check out the story in the thread that talks about the most interesting town you have been driven out of.
Yeah, saw that one… although it might be a bad idea in Toledo, it’s considered suicide in Amsterdam rush hour traffic - You’ll need F18A Hornett Pilot Reflexes over here
So, we’ll ditch the car real soon and hit the town center - by bike, of course !
The farthest I’ve ever been from home is Connecticut, I think. About 2000 miles. I need to travel more, dammit! Strtrkr, if you don’t want to fly to Europe, I’ll do it for you…
Modest? You bet I’m modest! I am the queen of modesty!
Backpacked to Istanbul in 1993. Crossed the Bosphorus to Asia and sat in a cafe with some locals (and a madman from NY) and had four cups of tea (in those crazy lil gilded cups) and some of the best hashish in my life to commemorate the occasion.
I was born in Texas. When I was in the Navy in the late 70’s, my ship, a destroyer, was sent to Anchorage, Alaska. Three weeks later, we were in Hawaii. Since my ship was a Reserve “tin can”, we never went for long tours. Those were the longest trips we ever took.
Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to relive it. Georges Santayana
Year: 1993
Home at the time: None, really. Between Pittsburg (grad school) and Denver (new job).
Traveled to: China (including the interior), Hong Kong (was still separate then), Thailand (including the north) and India.
This was the farthest physically that I’ve traveled from my home.
In terms of farthest conceptually/emotionally, I’d have to say chartering a plane to fly us (family) into a remote dirt airstrip in the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania in 1994 for a walking safari and “fly camping”. This basically means sleeping on a river bank in a sleeping bag with mosquito net over you and a lantern on a stick beside you so you don’t get trampled in the night. Then you wake up in the AM with elephant tracks, etc. going right past you. Absolutely magical.
The hard part was, left camp on a Saturday morning, flew to Dar Es Salaam, then to Nairobi, then London, Chicago, Denver. Took 1.5 days of solid travel to get home and on Monday morning I was stuck in the commuter traffic on my way back to my “high-tech” job. 48 hours earlier I’d been sleeping
in the wilds of East Africa. Very disconcerting. Felt like I’d traveled about a million miles (and a couple centuries to boot!). But also part of why I like traveling so much. (Gee, can you tell?)