How Far Is Far?

[plumtreeblossom]

And now, a clicky poll for you:


[Poll #947987]

Comments

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I'm like that, too -- my sense of distance is on a miniature scale, kind of like NYC people. You'll hear things from me like "I'm not going all the way the hell out to Watertown!" But I know people who live in places like SoCal who think nothing of driving 3 hours just to go to a party. Being with Wabbit has taken me to some uber-distant places, like Danvers, because he adores driving. But left to my own devices, the territory of "near" ends at the borders of the western half of Camberville. :-)

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

It used to be that my only regional friends lived in JP, and I didn't know anyone north of the Charles. So every time I wanted to socialize, I had to take the T to JP, which was an hour. I hated it, but it was that or spend all of my free time alone. I was mightly glad when I started making friends in the neighborhood.

[crs.livejournal.com]

In Europe, a hundred miles is a long way.
In America, a hundred years is a long time.

[evilshell.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

And since moving to Europe 4.5 years ago, I've started to think 100 miles is too far to go unless it is important. In the US, however, I've had commutes that were almost that long each way.

[zzbottom.livejournal.com]

Keep in mind, I used to drive down from Vermont for Poly Socials and discussion groups. So, in doing the math, that was about 4.5-5 hours on the road, and 2-3 hours in beowabbit's living room.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

You must be from LA! For 4-5 hours on the road, I would have to plan days in advance, pack snacks and road trip music, and make at least 3 pee-n-smoke stops. :-)

[zzbottom.livejournal.com]

And it'd be even worse in the South where you'd have to stop for all those people to lick you!

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Oh, I amended that to let Northerners lick me, too!

THINK GLOBALLY
LICK LOCALLY

[happyfunpaul.livejournal.com]

It depends too much on "for how long and for what purpose?"

For an all-day event or longer, an hour's drive away is nothing.

For a half-day event, an hour (2 hours round-trip) driving is not at all a problem. I often drive that far on a Saturday for a fun event-- music gathering in Providence or Worcester, say-- where I'll be for several hours.

I will occasionally drive an hour out and an hour back for a dinner with friends on a weeknight, but it's rare-- that's pretty far to go for just dinner, so I'll only do it for friends I don't get to see much otherwise.

I drove about an hour (Medford to Auburn) to go buy my current Mac computer (at a sharp discount). So clearly I'll drive two hours round trip for a good deal. :-)

Otherwise, for any event that's shorter or less important, an hour's drive away is indeed "far away."

[happyfunpaul.livejournal.com]

Addendum: My work commute is usually 35-to-45 minutes long, each direction. I find that to be an awfully long amount of time to spend in the car on a regular basis (prior to this job, I had several jobs in succession where I commuted via bicycle or walking or public transit). Also, each additional segment of time (the extra 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes...) seems especially irksome.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

My commute is 45-minutes each way by T, which feels not-long because I can read during it. But if I had to drive that length and focus on the driving, it would feel like an eternity, I think.

[beowabbit]

An hour’s drive is “nearby”, for me.

An hour’s walk is a fairly long haul.

(Once upon a time I was dating somebody in Northampton and somebody in rural Virginia. I’d occasionally visit the person in Northampton on weeknights. I loved the fog in the valley as the sun came up.)

It's A Car-Free Thing

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Oh my! For me, rural Virginia would be right out, and Northampton would only be okay if the person was willing to do about 75-80% or the traveling! :-)

I think the only long-distance place I'd be willing to date to would be NYC, because, well, it's NYC, and I'd be going just as much for the city as for the person. But I'd only be able to go perhaps every 6 weeks at the most, on accounta being teh busy here at home. But if you asked me 8 or 9 years ago before I had any friends in Boston, I would have gone every weekend if I could have afforded it.

[library-sexy.livejournal.com]

I was doing and hour each way to get to work for 3 1/2 years. It becomes auto pilot after a while. The traffic around here can turn a 15 minute drive into an hour easily. If I could drive an hour and really drive I would much prefer to do that then to sit in traffic for an hour on something I could do in 15 without the traffic.

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

When you've driven cross-country and lived in Australia, a one-hour drive doesn't even remotely count as far away. :)

That said, I took "one hour is 'nearby'" for me as the option I would choose if I lived in a rural area with nothing of substance in close range. There's also the fact that sometimes it can take an hour to drive 5 miles within the city, but that's not "far away" at all, just sucky traffic.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I totally forgot to factor in traffic. Yeah, for the poll I was imagining 1 hour of no-heavy-traffic, which is only a myth in Boston. :-)

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

No, not so! I totally saw it once!

[oakenguy.livejournal.com]

It feels like a long haul to me these days. Back when I was living in rural Maine, it was the equivalent of a trip to the convenience store.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

It entirely depends on the local geography, or--as someone else mentioned--how much fun is nearby. What the transportation options are is also a factor.

When I lived in Boston without a car, Lexington was far away. When I lived in California, Jason and I lived an hour apart for the first 2 years of our relationship and spent several nights a week together. When we were travelling in Scotland, Glasgow was full (two different conventions--not a room to be had in the whole place) so we went back to Edinburgh, stayed there and spent the next three days touring Glasgow, a 45-minute trip by train from our hotel--locals thought we were completely nuts..."That's the other side of the country," they'd say.

[roina-arwen.livejournal.com]

I guess for me it would depend on how often I needed to drive it. For example, it would be quite long if I needed to drive it back and forth to work every day - I *totally* wouldn't do that. But if it's to visit a friend once in a while for the day or for an overnighter, then it's only a medium distance to me. I'd never call it "nearby", but sometimes an hour seems shorter than others!

[okwhatever5.livejournal.com]

I've driven to Alaska, across the US coast to coast, and the trips never bothered me...until I had kids. Twenty minutes is painful unless I'm well-stocked with toys, snacks, and other amusements (for them and myself!)

[marmota.livejournal.com]

I think of one hour as a typical driving range for work commuting, and I'd go two hours each way if by public transit... and, considerably further for fun. I've been known to drive to Portsmouth, Providence, or Springfield for concerts and/or dinners, Vermont and Maine for day hikes, and when I lived in Yonkers I'd frequently head up to Boston or down to Baltimore for the weekends. The east coast is tiny, New England is even tinier. Then again, I ran into a similar perspective on the other coast once when proposing, and eventually talking a bunch of people into, grabbing dinner at a neat place in Palm Springs when we were in Irvine at the time, all of an hour and a half or so away. I do try to state actual travel times, though; DC folks have an irksome habit of calling halfway around the beltway 'just around the corner'.


The 'T' puzzles me a bit, in that you can't get anywhere on it reliably in under an hour, but you can get just about everywhere on it in an hour. Yet given the area it covers, it seems like people in Brookline hang mainly there, and people in Somerville hang mainly there, usw, anyway. It's a very strange mix of cosmopolitan and provincial.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I tend to assign different value to car travel time than to T travel time. My daily one-way commute by T + foot, from door to door, is 45 minutes, and I think nothing of it. Conversely, it's 45 minutes to drive to Providence for Waterfire, but I think of it as "out of town travel" and I have to plan ahead for it.

Dating someone in Quincy, it took a couple of weeks to talk myself out of the notion that I was in a long-distance relationship. :-) Now it feels local, but in the beginning it felt far.

At this point I don't think I could ever adjust to low population density living. I can't grok the point of having a house if it isn't within skipping distance of the things you need. Others would argue that solitude and privacy are more important, but to each his own, I guess.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I wrote that I consider it to be basically a road trip -- but Lis's work is a half0hour away -- and I usually drive her to work. So I drive an hour to get Lis to work and then come back home. But, see, that's two half-hours, not an hour.

[ah42.livejournal.com]

Many moons ago, before I joined in a caravan to Florida, long before I made my way to CA and back, I thought a 20-minute drive was a long distance. 20 minutes from Dudley barely gets you to Worcester; there really isn't much to do in town, and back then, I hated driving in the city, so I never went.

Now I consider 2 hours easily doable, as long as you have some good tunes. I'm 1.5 hours from Somerville, and it's just barely far enough away to keep me from visiting regularly (although the cost of gas has a greater impact than travelling time at that point. I only get 12mpg!)

On the other hand, I think I'm becoming more city-friendly, in that I will gladly walk 30 minutes to get a sandwich, but there's no way I'll ever drive for 30 minutes for the same rewards... unless it's a particularly rewarding sandwich.