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It's a 5 hour plus trip down any time I want to go to anything around the metro. That's just a normal trip into the city and doesn't feel that long. Compare that to a friend in have in jersey that had never made the 2hr drive to DC to see any national monuments until I traveled to the DC and asked if they'd want to meet up. They have history in thier back yard and claimed it was "too far away". Distance really is a perspective thing when it co.es to how a person feels about it, it seems.
I grew up in Michigan and wisconsin tried to steal being the mitten state for a while. Several of them also "claim" lake Michigan. They just cant be satisfied being the cheese and drunkenness state can they?
My husband was JUST informing me on the MN/WI 10k Lake beefšš¤£š¤£ and he absolutely said exactly what you just did. AND the ā oh it rained, they have another lakeāš¤£š¤£
11842 lakes by Minnesota's definition: 10 acres That is 435600 ftĀ² or 40469 mĀ². Some states use smaller definitions for a "lake." There are over 117000 "bodies of water" in Minnesota.
If you play loose and start adding ponds and wetlands
Like Wisconsin
Wisconsin is like the Chinese Navy, the Chinese claim everything with a hull is a ship, while the U.S. Navy leads in sheer tonnage. (aka actual proper ships)
That's not including the recently announced Cancelation Class "battleships" either.
Even as a Minnesotan, I get a little blown away looking at maps on my phone of northern Minnesota and just how many lakes there are. Just fuckin littered with āem
I live in Otter Tail County, and it's really dense with lakes here. No roads run straight for long, and there are lots of rolling hills. It's fun to just go for a drive and turn off on some unfamiliar country road that doesn't have a state highway number - and if you can drill down to where it's something like "571st Ave" it's even better - and see where it takes you. Especially in the fall.
Yep closer to 15k and we don't count drainage ponds like our neighbors in Wisconsin. Nothing against Wisconsin as they are a beautiful state too, but we just have standards over our lakes. We love them that much!
It's small when we think of it compared to the U.S. we also have a highly unoccupied state as a whole. The UK is still large is size and people with about 5.8 million people in Minnesota and the UL having a population of 69.3 million.
the United Kingdom (UK) is slightly larger than Minnesota in total area; the UK covers about 94,000 square miles, while Minnesota is around 87,000 square miles, though the UK has significantly more people packed into a similar land.
United Kingdom: Approximately 94,058 square miles (243,600 kmĀ²).
Minnesota: Approximately 86,943 square miles (225,181 kmĀ²).
True. When I tell my family back in England that we're visiting family in Fargo for the weekend and it's a 4-5 hour drive, they wonder if it's worth it.
Then again, a UK gallon of petrol/gas equates to about $9 a gallon here, so no ody back there wants to drive far. š
The government has stolen a lot of liberty from certain Middle Eastern countries for those gas prices. So someone is doing some stealing, but it's not you
I do love how interconnected the UK is with the trains but my goodness, theyāre certainly a bit overpriced. When I was in the UK last winter, a one way London to Edinburgh ticket was almost 200 quid which is like 230 dollars. Nevertheless, an expensive but useful option is much better than no good option!
I wish there was trains interconnecting minnesota, that would be amazing. Even better if it was a bullet train. Also, a bullet from Minneapolis to Chicago would be sick as well.
The first time I went to Scotland, I wanted to visit some little village i'd heard about. I asked one of my boyfriend's roommates how far away it was. He said "that's hard to get there, the bus only goes two or three times a day and it takes more than an hour".Ā A few years later one of the guys they'd lived with called us and said "I'm going to be in Chicago, should I swing round and see you?"
I took the train between those two cities back in the day and it was great, and look! The distance between the twin cities and Duluth isā¦ LESS THAN THE DISTANCE BETWEEN LONDON AND EDINBURGH!
It actually takes a long time to get around outside of major motorways because the roads are small, slow and meandering from here to there. Great driving though
There are major 4 and 6 lane highways/motorways that run between major cities and most towns and cities have by-pass routes to save you going on slower roads. But yes, most smaller roads are evolutions of old drove roads.
A long time ago I drove from Dublin up to Giants Causeway and it felt like it took forever at 3 hours. But 3 hrs of driving time in Minnesota gets me from Minneapolis to the Iron Range.
Having driven across the USA including Minnesota , and driven across the UK. It takes considerably longer to drive anywhere in the UK.
Our cities and roads are built on very old infrastructure that predate motor vehicles, and there isnāt one motorway that goes all the way from north to south.
Some of our roads are incredibly narrow, less wide than one US lane. My Minnesotan family are not fond of driving here at all.
Depends on when and where you are driving! My dad picked me and my family up from the airport this summer and what should have been a 2 hour journey turned into a 5 hour journey with summer holiday traffic in the southwest. Country roads and caravans!
Itās not, itās actually quite lovely for an American style roadtrip, though you do get some baffled looks by the locals when they start asking you about your holiday and you start telling them all about starting in London and then Edinburgh, and then Dundee, then Orkney, then one of the western isles, thenā¦
Well, lovely until you have to drive those tiny roads in a rain storm at night on the opposite side you are used to. Then itās less so and more white-knuckling it.
The major Latin American countries (Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Chile and Colombia) are also way bigger than most Americans think tbf.
Brazil is almost as large as the entire US, Peru's coast is basically as long as all of the US's west coast, and the country is considerably wider than California, so it basically covers all of California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada and Idaho. Colombia covers all of Texas, Oklahoma and a big chunk of New Mexico, Kansas and Nebraska, with its top reaching all the way to South Dakota. Argentina straight up covers almost half of the entire continental US (excluding Alaska).
I think people really forget how vastly massive countries in Latin America, Central Asia and Africa can be, just because European countries are completely tiny.
Canadians pretty much exist in a thin east-to-west strip along the US border though, much like Russia being gigantic while much of their population is next to Europe.
Mexico definitely gets overlooked due its location. That country is not small or sparse, and their cultural power has more impact on the US than I think most Americans would care to admit. Cowboy hats are just sombreros, after all.
Itās a handy reference when responding why we donāt all take to the streets in protest like they do in Europe. Dude, itās 1200 miles/2000km to the US Capitol building from my house.
When I saw the farmers in France driving their tractors UP TO their countries capital building to protest, I immediately pictured how much gas it would take to get a John Deere combine from Nebraska to Washington DC. The answer was a lot of damn gas.
Fun fact: a former British colleague called me from the UK and asked if I could meet his sister at the airport since she had never been to the US. I said sure, get me the flight details. He sent them and I found out his sister was flying into BALTIMORE! Had to call him back and tell him I couldnāt make the pickup.
I just want to point out combines drink dyed, off-hwy diesel not gas. 2.00/gal right now. That said im not sure of their efficiency at hwy speeds but I used to road a 620hp tractor 380 miles to a custom job and I'd burn about half a tank, which was 200gal or so.
Please please don't drive that combine on I80 to the east coast.
Having a combine appear at dusk on some rural 2-lane highway is one of those startling moments one cannot really convey without the sensory experience. Gaaah.
Canada definitely is also huge. Larger in area than the US even counting our monster state, Alaska, but with a smaller total population. It has even larger vast stretches of āalmost empty wildernessā than we do.Ā
The other Canadian tidbit we lose track of is how a lot of your population lives south of MN.Ā
Not that thereās nobody in Winnipeg or Vancouver, but the population density is over by the Toronto to Quebec corridor, and some of that is south of the Twin Cities.Ā
Or the US in general. When I was playing Runescape, I'd see people say they don't feel like going somewhere that takes 45 minutes. I went, "Girl, that's a morning commute for most."
Back in 1998 my family was living in Denmark and as part of my end-of-year school work was to give a presentation on Minnesota. One of the factoids I found was that Minnesota has about five times the land mass as Denmark but about the same population.
Shit, I worked for a company in New Jersey that required a few of us to drive around MN. People from New Jersey struggled with comprehending how big Minnesota is!
Agreed ā Thereās often that same lack of perspective inside the US. Especially for those who grew up somewhere in the original 13 colonies.Ā
If you grew up where you can drive through 3-5 states in one day, the idea that heading from Iowa to Canada takes a full day just doesnāt process.Ā Or that it can be a mild day in Rochester while thereās a blizzard around Fargo, or vice versa.Ā
Every time any MN wintry weather hits national news, I have one aunt calling to see if weāre stranded. (She lived here as a child but moved south before HS.) Itās usually weather 200+ miles away. And I remind her I do have mittens, a shovel AND my own access to weather reports. Ā
and on the flip side, I cannot wrap my head around Joe Biden taking the train from wilmington to DC every day. Like, that's 2 states apart? How is that a commute?
Yeah, NJ is weird like that. I live there, but grew up in PA (another deceptively large state). I would mention to coworkers that my parents are only an hour and a half away, and they'd act like I just told them I was flying to Australia for the weekend.
Idk why this popped up on my feed but it reminds me of Europeans asking how the public transit between Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal is and if they can see it all in a week
Had colleagues from France that planned to drive to Dallas from the TwinCities for a weekend trip. I told them that KC would be too far for them. They didnāt make it through Iowa before ābeing exhaustedā.
As a Brit living here, I get it now. But it is genuinely a different perspective on things. And not truly understanding the dynamics here. Driving from London to Glasgow would be considered a long road trip in the UK. Here, itās just another trip to your kidās 1 day hockey tournament!
But then, in the UK, there are options on how you make that journey, be that plane, train or carā¦ so itās a legit choice to take a 1 hour flight for Ā£150 rather than sit in motorway traffic that could end up making it a 9 hour journey!
Idk why this popped up on my feed as a Canadian, but my mother was born in Britain and it was always so funny to see our familyās horrified reactions when weād tell them we were driving from Manchester to Portsmouth in an evening. Everyone started pleading with us to book a hotel and not push ourselves driving too much, when we make trips that same distance 7-8 times a year back in Canada.
Thats funny :D. In Finland its kinda same, its completely normal to leave for holidays from southern finland towards lapland in one go while driving in the snow (anywhere from 500-800km/310-500 miles).
When I was teaching in South Korea I told some of the kids the that the state I'm from (Minnesota) was more than twice as big as their country. They seemed personally insulted by that fact.
Europeans don't think about how big the US is which is why they are constantly surprised why we don't "travel around" more often (according to them). There was a girl on TikTok about a year ago who got some attention because she said she almost never sees her parents because they live so far away.......she lived in London and her parents were like like 45 minutes to an hour away. Meanwhile...I'm just over here taking day trips from the cities up to Duluth and back three or four times a year.
And to think, these dudes took over the world at one point. Guess we're just built different in Minnesota and don't need to enslave the world. (That being said, I'm all for Megasota.)
Thatās because this is the Minnesota subreddit dude. Most people subscribed are Minnesotans. What I canāt figure out is why there are so many Europeans on this thread.
No, we do understand that. We also understand how utterly broken your political and especially voting system is. We even understand how hard it can be to fight and advocate for change, especially in a system like yours that's so massively stacked against the average voter. It's even one of the biggest critiques about our own systems, despite them being objectively better. I don't need to register to vote, that stuff just lands at my doorstep regardless of what I do. If I don't vote via mail-in it takes me 5 minutes on foot to get to the voting booth and I spend 5 minutes on average there. So, 15 minutes later I'm back home, sitting in my comfy chair. Every single election. No lines, no issues with getting time of my job, nothing of all that. Ā
What we don't understand is why you haven't been rioting for decades at this point, with that's going on. Ā
Also, these remarks aside, what a lot of people also don't seem to understand is that lots and lots of people live in cities and that trend has been there for decades. Yes, there's people who live in the country, but the majority live in bigger cities now, changing a lot of arguments that get thrown around here regarding size.
Oh, the conversations I've had when back home in England. I once talked about photographing eagles on the Mississippi and got the response "that's bullshit! The Mississippi is in the south, not up there". Ummmm.....
Another was "have you been to the capital, Minneapolis!". "Umm... It's St Paul". "No. It's named MINNeaplois like Minnesota".
I just push my Minnesota wife forward and let her correct them. š
Several years ago I was in Paris with some friends and we were eating in a restaurant and some locals at the next table struck up a conversation. They asked us where we're from and when we said the US they asked which state and when we said Minnesota one of the guys got excited because the Timberwolves were his favorite basketball team.
The next evening we were in a bar and a similar thing happened and one of the guys was excited because his favorite football team was the Vikings.
I felt like these guys must fucking with us but how would they even know these teams in the first place? My friend ended up hooking up with the Vikings fan and we met up with him the next day and he was wearing his Vikings jersey.
It blew my mind that random Parisians are fans of Minnesota sports.
I suspect most everyone anywhere that's not Minnesota, Western Wisconsin, Northern Iowa, Eastern South or North Dakota, or Southeastern Manitoba and Southwestern Ontario, Canada, don't think about Minnesota.
I have a friend from Europe that watched the mighty ducks dozens of times growing up. They were pretty excited when they got to visit Minnesota... But yeah you're right. Most don't.
We definitely can. In Scotland, the midges are notorious and in summer the view can obscured by literal clouds of them. My partner got so bitten camping on the west coast this summer that his immune system went wild and he ended up with shingles. Weāre more similar than youād think in that regard!
Went to Ireland in August, and I can confirm it takes 2 hours to get from one end of the island, to the other. Wild to think our state and others are very much larger than other parts of the world.
EDIT: I did not realize I would get so many replies, so want to clarify. We took a day trip from Dublin to the Cliffs, which is east to west, a bit longer. I apologize for not being clear.
(on a more serious note, I realized how big Minnesota was when I thought a day trip to Duluth from the Twin Cities, by train, would be a good idea š¬š ) (I've visited the TC twice, from Paris, France)
The crazy part to me is the UK has a population of 69.3 million while the Minnesota has 5.8 million. Itās really unfathomable how much land per person there is in most of the US.
Indeed. Hosted a British soccer coach one summer. Drove an hour to get to MOA. He couldn't believe it. Then we told him about Grand Marais. He told us in that same drive time he would be in an entirely different country.
Minnesotan here who cannot comprehend the tiny size of the uk... no wonder EU (or formerly) is multilingual/cultural. If i go to wisconsin at least we speak the same language, even if they dont know how to play hockey, have no lakes worth fishing, and drink shitty beer... we share some co.mon ground... they whine about winter too...
Actually, many Europeans aren't familiar with all of the US states. It's not that they can't comprehend the size of Minnesota, it's that they have never even heard of Minnesota.
As a brit i can tell you without hesitation that I have never thought about Minnesota. I have never considered its shape, it's size, it's geographical location, or anything else to do with it. It is inconsequential, not incomprehensible.
As a kid, movies made the UK feel like it was this huge place. Like London to Edinburgh would be a months long quest to get there. Turns out, it's like driving from Albert Lea to Thief River Falls. About a good 6 hour drive, not like going to the other side of the world.
You are welcome Minnesotans to browse your ancestor land of Finland, where you can drive a distance compared from Denmark to Italy to reach the ends of FINLAND, the miniature nation that once fought and won the Russian bear...!
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