I have several friends in online games from Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, Italy, etc. I tell them I’m from Florida, and they ask how close I am to Orlando. When I tell them it’s a 3 hour drive, they ask if Disney is actually in Florida. Then I tell them it takes 8 hours to drive from Tampa to Key West, and they’re boggled. It’s like they think we’re this little island.
Just think how amazed they’d be if they questioned someone from Texas.
I had some friends from Germany who were exchange students when I was in high school. Four years after high school, I was in the Air Force stationed at Davis-Monthan in Tucson.
I had been home to Idaho on leave, and received a phone call from my friends. They were in town and wanted to get together. They also had stand-by tickets for air travel. I asked if they wanted to ride with me from Idaho to Arizona, through Nevada, and then catch a flight out of Tucson to wherever from there. They heartily agreed to do so.
This was in the month of June. When I told them we'd only be driving in three states, they figured it'd be a short drive.
It took a day getting from my folks' place in Idaho to Las Vegas, NV (pulling a trailer with my Dad's truck, that had my car on the trailer). They couldn't believe just how big the west was. They also couldn't believe we'd only been traveling in two states for the entire day's drive.
The next day, we headed from Las Vegas, over the Hoover Dam, and into AZ. They were amazed at the size of the dam, and the reservoir that is Lake Mead.
Then we went through Phoenix. There was a big sign from a bank that read that the temperature was 111 degrees. They looked at the sign without much recognition. Then after about ten seconds, it switched to Celsius. It read 44 degrees. They about fell all over themselves explaining how hot that was. Yeah. Tell me about it. It was truly amazing to them, because they rarely saw anything above the low-mid 80s where they were from.
Try driving from Pensacola to Key West.