My parents moved down to Cary, outside Raleigh, NC, from northern NJ (where east and west are easy to discern - either toward or away from those giant buildings you see on the horizon).
My dad kept trying to explain directions to me: eg take the inner beltway or the outer beltway. In my head I imagined two ring roads around Raleigh, like concentric circles maybe 3 miles and 7 miles from the city center. I always wondered why such a relatively small place warranted two large highways.
It was several years of visits before I realized that the inner and outer beltways were THE beltway, just opposite sides of the same road, going “clockwise” and “counterclockwise”
The Wall wasn’t built until 1961, I’m told that before that people were able to travel back and forth. There’s a famous picture of an East German soldier leaping to the West as the Wall was built.
More useless information: per Walter Ulbricht, the Wall was called the “Antifascistischer Schutzwall”. So a wall to keep West Germans out, instead of what it became, namely to keep the East Germans in. They were fleeing by the dozens and the Russians didn’t like that.
A good catch question for the geographically misconceiving is
“If you take off from London and fly directly West, which is the first US state that you fly over?”
You don’t. If you started from central or northern England you’d eventually reach Alaska, but a line west from London (51°30’ N) passes well north of the contiguous 48 states and just south of the southernmost tip of the Aleutians
While you usage of “Inner Beltway” and “Outer Beltway” is correct, there in fact will be two ring roads around Raleigh in the near future. The beltway you refer to is I-440, which is indeed relatively close to the city center. I-540, when completed, will encircle the more distant suburbs. When I lived there in the early 2000s they had just completed the first section, from I-40 to US-70/Glenwood Ave. From the looks of Google Maps it now extends more than halfway around the city, but is still not complete (or does not yet show up on Google Maps; I’m not sure what the lag is for new roads to appear there).
Not surprised to hear that - my experience with the region started almost 30 years ago, and the growth in the area was astonishing, so a second beltway was inevitable I guess. But at the time, it seemed like a poor way to explain it, though once it was clear, it made some sense
Ahh, but you don’t have 1500 miles of landmass directly west of London so you don’t get icy winters. Oceanic currents can be wonderful things. Be thankful.
I think it works if you start from Gatwick at 51.09’ N
But my Google-fu has failed - I was sure I’d checked the southernmost point in Alaska and got Adak, which is just that bit further north.
You may recall that on 9/11 a lot of transatlantic flights were diverted to
Gander in Newfoundland. The story of how local people looked after the 6500 passengers who were stranded there has been made into a film.
The reason Gander is able to accept large planes is that it is on the most direct route between London and New York and in the early days of passenger flights, they would stop there to refuel.
Well, Gatwick is in Surrey, so, to call that flying from London seems kind of pushing it. Amchitka goes as far south as 51°22’, so it covers a lot of the greater London area, and it is in the Aleutians.
St. Johns, Newfoundland is another similar spot. Which also accepted a bunch of unexpected visitors on 9/11.
I wasn’t involved in any of that but my brother was flying a flight from London to the US that night/morning. They ended up in IIRC Halifax. They wanted to avoid landing on Newfoundland proper, not knowing how long it might be before air travel resumed. Being stuck on an island vs. being stuck on the North American continent seemed like a pretty straightforward consideration; if everyone was eventually going to be getting home via bus and train, leaving out the ferry would be helpful.
Oh boy, just wait until you find out about “London Luton” and “London Stansted” (both about an hour’s drive from anything you might actually want to visit in London itself, on a good day with no traffic - i.e. never). Gatwick has much quicker transport connections to central London than those 2 (not that much longer than Heathrow) and so can more legitimately be called a London airport. But we have strayed away from “geographical misconceptions” into “marketing misconceptions”.
Well, if I got on a plane here and flew over Greenland to get to London, it would most likely not be a plane that would land at Luton, Stansted or Gatwick.
Freshman year of college, I drove my girlfriend to visit her newly-married friends at (IIRC) Fort Stewart, in Georgia. Long drive from upstate SC, and it had gotten long past dark when we started seeing signs along the road we were travelling. Time has erased their exact wording, but the gist of one of them was “Alligators in ditches” and the gist of the other was “Tanks may cross road at any time without warning.”
I have never been more alert while driving.
Thanks to MASH and the innumerable shows which filmed on the same back-lot, I think a great deal of the universe looks like South Korea.
Sure doesn’t. One year, the Canadian Math. Soc. had their annual meeting in Saint John, NB and, sure enough, one of their main speakers went to St. John’s, NFLD. Oddly enough the following year the meeting was in St. Johns and the organizers were extra careful to make the difference clear.
One of my misconceptions was not realizing that there were parts of NJ that are SW of Philly. My wife was from a small town called Salem and from my parents western suburb of Philly, you drove west to Kennett (being careful to get some mushrooms there), then south to Wilmington and finally a bit east to the Del Mem. Br to get there.
