[jcranmer]

I'm reminded of this joke:

Europeans find it strange that Americans think 100 years is a long time. Americans find it strange that Europeans think 100 miles is a long distance.

There really is dichotomy here: Americans are used to a vast geography but don't really have any internalization of just how vast history can be, while Europeans understand their long history but don't have the internalization of just how vast a country can be.

To put a finer point on the latter bit: the distance between Chicago and New York is roughly the same as between Copenhagen, Denmark and Bern, Switzerland (i.e., longer than any two points in Germany). The distance between LA and Boston is longer than the distance between Gibraltar and Moscow or between Edinburgh, UK to Jerusalem, Israel.

[crispyporkbites]

Moving further afield, Senegal is closer to Canada than it is to Somalia. I had to look that one up on a map when I first heard it.

[jcranmer]

That is a paradox more of spherical geometry.

Dakar is about 4000 miles from the North Carolina coast. If you move the destination up the longitude of that point, you have to go 1000 miles north from the coast (in Quebec, in fact!) to get 4100 miles away from Dakar. The fact that Canada is much further north than Africa doesn't add all that much distance, but Newfoundland jutting out so far to the east reduces the distance quite spectacularly.

Over longer distances, the spherical effects are even more screwy. The shortest way to get to Mecca from Seattle is to actually start flying north along I-5, and Thule, Greenland and Minsk, Belarus are natural pitstops along this route.