On a clear day you can see New London CT from Orient NY. If you drive (and don’t take a ferry) it’s 217 miles.
Not quite on the scale of Tarifa to Tangier or Moulhoule to Murad but the Rion-Antirion
Bridge in Greece is an iconic engineering project where a 2.5km span bypasses the 5 hour drive around the Gulf of Corinth.
Here’s one people actually have to do now and then. The Hood Canal Floating Bridge is sometimes closed for longer than a few hours. A friend of mine had a very long drive home a few weeks ago.
During the 1993 Mississippi River floods, after several crucial bridges washed out (and whether a local man deliberately broke the dike is still up for debate) the river itself at the Quincy or Hannibal region was about a mile wide, but people had to drive to either Keokuk or St. Louis to cross the river.
The current was too swift for boats, so some people literally flew back and forth to work.
When I lived in St. Louis I learned a lot about the Mississippi & Missouri rivers as trasnport corridors themselves, and as major obstacles to wheeled transportation.
It is actually pretty amazing how few road bridges and how many fewer rail bridges there are over the Mississippi. The USA’s ground transportation network could be cleaved into two disconnected halves a LOT more easily by a lot fewer bombs than one might expect.
As you say, even a couple of downed bridges can introduce multi-hundred mile detours.
For some reason, I can’t get Google Maps to display this as it incorrectly thinks the border between Morocco and Algeria is open (2 years ago, I tried it and Google correctly routed around the border). But a trip between Oujda and Oran looks like it needs to swing south into Western Sahara, through Mauritania into Mali and then finally north to Algeria for a 8200km detour to avoid a closed border crossing.
There’s also occasional road closures in the Australian West that leads to viral Google Maps detour suggestions like this 7100 km monster.
Update: I originally thought there was no border crossing between Mauritania and Algeria but it looks like one opened up in 2018 so my answer is only valid for pre-2018.
While it’s nowhere near as far as some of the things mentioned in this thread, it’s worth mentioning that you can see the Oakland International Airport from the San Francisco International Airport, and vise versa – they’re right across the Bay from each other. But they’re about a 30 mile drive from each other. And probably farther if you’re taking public transportation.
Which reminds me of the 1989 earthquake when the Bay Bridge was closed for months (IIRC?). To get across the Bay to Oakland from San Francisco one had to go south to the San Mateo - Hayward Bridge.
That added about 40-50 miles to what’s normally a 10-15 mile drive from SF.
I used to travel to STL MO several times a year for work. Totally agree with all that you said.
STL MO, years ago, was at the intersection of the major “super-highways” of the time — I’m talking 19th century, 18th century, and earlier: you’ve got the Mighty Mississippi River which passes STL from north to south, and you also have two other major rivers, the Missouri and the Illinois, emptying into the Mississippi very close by.
Back then, it doesn’t get any busier than that.
There’s a simple park, Edward and Pat Jones-Confluence Point State Park in West Alton MO, where you can stand at the junction of the Missouri emptying into the Mississippi. It’s a quiet place, but standing there and imagining life only 150 years earlier one can imagine the relative hustle and bustle that must’ve been there at that time.
Near that park is the National Great Rivers Museum in Alton IL, that’s run by the US Army Corps of Engineers. About 10 years ago the museum was a little tired, but it still had excellent information about those three major river systems. I recommend it to anyone who’s in the area.
But yes, @LSLGuy, there aren’t too many places to cross the Mississippi, and it effectively cuts the nation, or at least CONUS, virtually in half.
There is a bridge, the Nipigon River Bridge (https://maps.app.goo.gl/wHGankKcCrgk6xGU8?g_st=ic) on the Trans-Canada Highway north of Lake Superior. It crosses the Nipigon River. At this location, it is the ONLY highway route north of Lake Superior. If you want to drive your eighteen-wheeler from eastern Canada to Western Canada, and you do not want to go south of the lake through the States, you must use this bridge.
Well, a few years ago, the bridge was closed suddenly because of structural problems. Trucks heading west were trapped on the eastern side of the bridge, and vice versa. The only alternative was to drive all the way around Lake Superior, a trip of at least 1000 km.
Pretty cool. That’s on the Great Lakes Circle Tour, a 6,500 mile road trip around the five Great Lakes (HOMES).
“It encompasses individual lake Circle Tours including New York State’s Seaway Trail system. The road route, marked by distinctive green and white signs, is usually the closest major road or highway to the water.”
From:
If the Øresund Bridge were closed, the shortest ferry-free drive from Malmö to Copenhagen would go from something like 25 miles to something like 3000 miles.
That’s wild. I’ve done that drive. Continuing north to Aalborg, the Storebæltsbroen on a windy day was a little hairy.
There is car ferry service across the Straight of Gibraltar so if I were the OP I wouldn’t consider it as needing a detour. Maybe @beowulff can give his opinion as the OP if it does.
Let’s say - no ferries. So, if you want to drive to the destination, you must go the long way around. Also, I think the ratio of the two distances is important. For my Grand Canyon example, it’s around 20:1, for the Long Island example it’s around 10:1.
I wonder what happened to trucker or trucks that for one reason on the other couldn’t cross the border. Are there special rules for truckers? Or do those loads just have to sit?
The OP reminds me of my peak bagging days when I stood at the high point on one side of Hell’s Canyon and looked across to the high point on the other side. I was hitting both of them within a weekend and had a 225 mile drive between them. That drive was the easiest part of the weekend.
We were visiting Sunset Crater National Monument in Arizona from Sedona when a forest fired closed US 89 south of us. The detour took us up through Grand Canyon NP, and back down to Flagstaff, turning a 45 mile drive to 206 mile ordeal. The next day we drove most of the same route back to GCNP to start our stay there.
The Black Canyon of the Gunnison probably deserves a mention. From the easternmost point on the north rim road (well worth a visit), the South Rim Visitor Center is easily visible, just under 3/4 of a mile away. The drive there is around 100 miles - or ~90 if you’re willing to spend a lot of extra time on terrible roads.