How's Bagpacking in America?

I had a fun time today, just finished my 3rd of 4 exams and went to hang out with some friends in my Islam class where we managed not to study and talk about the US this whole time. The conversation started out my friend, Hannah, she's going to do a work study in Albany, NY at Six Flags for the summer and wanted to know the weather. She then was asking about bagpacking and how to get to LA. I decided it was time to pull out a map and sadly ruin her dreams of bagpacking the US.

Nobody understands how big our country is. Out here or a lot of the Europeans I meet who have never been to the US. The girls today tried to compare it to the UK. Not even close. As a part of a paper I did for ROTC, I wrote about how there are things that we, as Americans, consider common knowledge that other countries dont. For instance, I never knew a majority of SE Asia was occupied and imprisoned by the Japanese in WWII. The US public school system didn't teach me that, because its not as important as other things are. However, I know the general size of the majority of countries in the world. I know we are huge and I know Singapore is mega mega tiny. World Geography, as I have found, is not common knowledge for the SE Asias to learn, even the very westernized Singaporeans don't learn much of it. Its ok, we all have our own educational priorities set up by the government, but it leads many foreigners to not understand about the size of the US.

I pulled up a map of the US on google images and pointed out the location of major cities. Then I described the distance (in driving time, since km/miles aren't a fun easy conversion lol). NM to FL, 30 hours. DC to FL, 12 hours (I know all the good ones!). IT was sad to tell her this, since she was really looking forward to a "cheap weekend bagpacking to LA", but its best she learns before her trip rather than during.

This is not the first time I've had this conversation. There have been many others, mainly with the Europeans, who say how "weird" American's are because they never go out of their country of "vacation". This was something that I needed to explain and I feel like I've really became aware of since I've been abroad. When American's go on a vacation, they normally stay within a few states of their home or visit family. Travel isn't cheap because our cities are very far apart, therefore there is no mega cheap mass transit like there is in Europe or SE Asia. They have cheap flights across cities/countries because they are so CLOSE. There are no bagpack friendly things in the US (like here/Europe) because people dont bagpack in the US since major sites are quite far away from each other. Its expensive enough to go cross-country, why go out of the country? We have every kind of landscape, lets just stay here. Its a true mindset of Americans I believe and a bit hard to explain to those who grew up out here where everything is so freaking close together!

We then proceded to pull up people of Walmart and laugh. It was great.

Only a few more days left :) After my exam Wed night, going out for a night on the town in Arab Street for some cheap beer and good hummus with friends and lounging by the pool for a day and a half before starting the realllly long journey home.