[rob74]

For me (fellow German) the first eye-opener was after arriving in LA and driving East along the I-10: first you drive for ~70 miles through the LA sprawl, then that peters out, then you reach Palm Springs, and then, after you have left that behind too, nothing (except for desert). The contrast between an agglomeration with 12.5 million people and the vast empty space right next to it is really fascinating...

[robotnikman]

Yep, I travel through the Sonora desert on a regular basis to visit family, most of the drive is just rocks and bare landscape. I always make sure to bring plenty of water on those drives in case the car breaks down or something.

It really is a feat of engineering when you think about it that highways were built and maintained over such vast distances and through some really inhospitable terrain. When driving that road I sometimes ponder what it was like building it.

[thaumaturgy]

Did you get a chance to drive around Nevada much? It's nearly as large as Germany, but has only two metropolitan areas, and outside of those ... very nearly nothing at all. There are signs warning that there's no petrol available for 160+km.

Also some of the best night sky in the country, and some areas are eerily still and quiet.

[omnibrain]

When we drove from Zion to Las Vegas in the evening it was fascinating, that we started to notice the "glow" of Las Vegas from ~100km away.

[ethbr0]

To me, with regards to density, the US is 4 slices.

A) East of the Appalachian Mtns

B) Appalachians to Mississippi River

C) Mississippi to Rockies

D) Rockies to Pacific

Of those, (C) is one or two orders of magnitude more remote than the others.

On the east coast, it's hard to be more than 30 minutes from a Starbucks. In South Dakota, it's easy to be 2.5 hours from the nearest one.

[jcranmer]

I'd adjust your definitions somewhat.

Broadly speaking, you have the Northeast Corridor, which is more or less a continuous conurbation from DC to Boston.

Outside of that, the Eastern US generally follows European models of density, with clear densely-populated urban regions (Chicago being the largest city, but more minor cities like Indianapolis or Dayton correspond well to minor urban centers in European countries, population wise), in a field of rural areas where there's basically a quantum of civilization anywhere the land is flat enough to actually support it. There's kind of omnipresent human presence in the rural areas of, say, Ohio (not unlike rural Netherlands, say), while the mountainous regions like West Virginia sees strips of small towns nestled in every river valley while the ridgelines are largely empty (like a lot of the Alps).

The boundary between rural-but-populated and rural-but-unpopulated in the US is not so much the Mississippi River, but the 100°W longitude line, the High Plains (or roughly a line running from Oklahoma City through Wichita and Omaha up to Winnipeg along I-29 and I-35). From here, there's basically nothing until you hit the Front Range and the beginning of the mountains.

Once you hit the Front Range and you look west, you're in a kind of combination of the previous two zones. There's again large urban centers. In some of the big valleys--Columbia, Snake, Central, and Willamette--you see basically a small slice of European-style omnipresent human presence in rural areas. But outside of these areas, the area is largely thoroughly unpopulated, more so than even the High Plains, due to either being a desert, mountainous, or both.

[actually_a_dog]

That's why they say "In America, 100 years is considered a long time; in Europe, 100 miles is considered a long distance."

[kolanos]

The Nevada section of US-50 is a particularly extreme case:

> In the stretch of highway between Fallon and Delta, Utah, a span of 409 miles (658 km), there are three small towns: Austin, Eureka, and Ely. This span is roughly the same distance as Boston, Massachusetts, to Baltimore, Maryland, or Paris, France, to Zürich, Switzerland.

Also known as the "Loneliest Road in America".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_50_in_Nevada

[defrost]

   Eyre Highway runs east from Norseman in Western Australia for 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) across the Nullarbor Plain to Ceduna, South Australia.

   It then crosses the top of the Eyre Peninsula as it continues eastwards for 470 kilometres (290 mi), before reaching Port Augusta.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyre_Highway

[rippercushions]

Siberia has entered the chat

The Kolyma Highway (aka Road of Bones) runs through over 2000 km of basically nothing, including the coldest place on Earth outside Antarctica.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R504_Kolyma_Highway

And they're building another 2300 km:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anadyr_Highway

[julian_t]

My wife and I drove that a few years ago on our NY-to-SF trip, and it was a truly memorable experience. And somewhere out in the desert you'd see a tiny wooden house left by a settler; we knew there was another town a few tens of miles further on and that we could be rescued if we broke down, but those early settlers... I can't get my head around that.