Dead_Cat wrote:
In a similar vein, Maine is the closest US state to Africa
Mind=blown!
Nope. It was August 1957. But they reprinted 50s stories in the 25 cent “Giants” so you may indeed have first read it in the 60s. Thinking about it, so may I.
Oamaru or more central?
My school was in Palmerston, which is south of Oamaru. So not as close as I thought (I thought 45th was near Moeraki).
I didn’t believe it when I found out that Pittsburgh is further east than Miami.
My father was keeper of the Quoddy Head light/ He married a mermaid one fine night?
I once drove from Detroit to Philadelphia. I was astonished to realize that, when I hit Pittsburgh, I was only halfway there.
mmm
Texas is so big it takes 90 minutes to drive across it in a jet. Boring as hell and ugly to boot. But at least it takes a long time. Did I mention the long time it takes?
Why no, I don’t much care for droning across Texas, how did you guess?
If you travel through the Panama Canal going from the eastern end to the western end, you travel from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
I remember insisting as a kid that of course we had to be driving north whenever we went to Washington, DC, because we lived in Virginia, didn’t we? (Nope. East-southeast, but I refused to believe it.)
Also, I don’t think I realized until right now that the part of Delaware we always visited when we went to the beach is actually south of my childhood home. In my head it was always a northward journey, although in practice it was much more east than anything else.
A lot of people, including Ontarians themselves, have no idea just how mind-bogglingly big Ontario is. I’ve driven across it before (a few times), and there is no way you can do it in one hop. Maybe if you had a co-driver or two, but not all by yourself.
I once took a train from Toronto to Edmonton. I had a sleeper, and so was welcome in the lounge at the rear of the train, which I quite enjoyed in the afternoon and evening. As strangers on a train will do, the other passengers in the lounge and I got to talking. One couple who also frequented the lounge was from California, and this was a train ride they were looking forward to.
We left Toronto at 9:00 AM. The next day, after breakfast, I headed for the lounge to have some more coffee. It was perhaps 9 or 10 in the morning. The couple from California were there and we exchanged greetings. Then they asked the steward “Where are we?”
Upon being told that we were still in Ontario, but would hit the Manitoba border by noon, the husband turned to his wife and said, “Still in Ontario after 24 hours! Jeez, and we thought California was big!”
I don’t care how many times, or how many ways you explain the Great Circle to me, unless I am actually looking at a globe, I will never, ever understand that New York City is closer to Lisbon than it is to London.
2100 km, for the route I looked at in Google maps (Some town tucked in the corner east of Ottawa, to Whiteshell, Manitoba.) That’s a good pull. I’ve done longer at a stretch (Austin, TX to Berkeley, CA) but I don’t recommend it. Texas isn’t that big.
Right. Yes, I know Palmerston. I was born in the North Island version but grew up in Dunedin.
All of continental North and Central America, Europe, and Asia is entirely north of the Equator. Asia is the most surprising. Singapore is just barely North Latitude.
I always instinctively felt it should be just west of Taiwan or somewhere just east of Hong Kong.
Inner Mongolia is part of China. The country of Mongolia, sometimes called Outer Mongolia, is not currently part of China but was controlled by China for several centuries until 1911.
Yow.
A bit of Brazil is north of all of Maine?
Wait a minute, I have a globe. A very old globe, but nowhere near old enough for the continents to have moved. Where do I have a globe? – on top of a bookcase that’s two feet taller than I am, out of reach. One stepstool later: a very dusty old globe. One dustcloth/old Tshirt later:
Almost all of South America is east of almost all of North America: yup.
But South America is not as far north as North America. And Brazil is definitely not north of Maine.
If you lay that map projection out over a globe, it may well be accurate. But if you lay it out flat as in the picture on that site, it’s massively misleading; just in a different way than more common maps are.
Just look how well it shows how close Antarctica is to Australia!
I still can’t get used to Alaska being straight north from Hawaii. Since they’re an hour or two ahead of us, it feels like they should be far northeast from here.