September 7th, 2008
So you wanna drive coast to coast huh? That's what people say anyway, "oh how romantic, all those small towns, the landscapes".
Some people have a dream of driving in the US. I guess they relish an exciting drive across the Bible Belt and then desert country.
According to Google, you can do New York-LA in a day and 17 hours, provided you pick the shortest (and fastest?) roads and drive non-stop.
What about coast to coast somewhere closer to home? Every summer a bunch of tourists pack into their cars and drive up to the north or Norway for a relaxing road trip on our narrow and windy roads.
The scale here is 1:2.
I had to put in two extra pins on the map, or Google would send me into Sweden. But there's your Lindesnes-Nordkapp connection.
It turns out the East-West coast span of the US isn't even twice as wide as our North-South run, and you can do it in roughly the same amount of time.
So basically if you've done North-South in Norway you've done more than half the distance across the US. Doesn't sound that impressive at all anymore, does it? :D
Ps. In the Netherlands you can do Maastricht-Groningen in 3 hours, it's like a paper route. :howler:
I can't believe you took this to your blog, I feel backstabbed :D
Once again you've used the wrong parameters. Also, you can really only take one route driving from North to South in Norway. In the US, you can take your pick between a variety of different routes through dozens of different landscapes. It's not even in the same league.
Norway - drive through mountains, same flora and fauna all the way down (pretty much). Mom, dad, I saw a moose, well woop-de-doo.
US - drive through forests, deserts, by mighty rivers, lakes or gigantic waterfalls. Hilly or mountainous terrain, farm lands or flat empty lands reaching to the horizons. Pass by cities like Washington DC, Chicago and Seattle, or are you gonna go via Miami and New Orleans?
You should consider deleting this blogpost, you're embarrassing yourself ;)
You assume too much, young one. These driving directions just pick the shortest route, but there's any number of routes you could pick in Norway. And no, they are not "all the same", no idea where you got that idea from. That's sort of the reason WHY people come to Norway. You can take the shortest route through the mountains or you can take the very, very chaotic route along the coast with lots and lots of ferries on the way. Or you can actually take a ferry all the way, it takes a week and it stops in all the "interesting" places. You would also obviously not just go from one end to the next, you'd veer off to a lot of places on the way.
Is one more interesting than the other? Might be. But you can't prove it, you haven't done either of them. :D
Nobody said Norway wasn't interesting, but it's not in the same league as the US. How could it possibly be? It's one nation versus an entire continent. You cannot seriously claim that the Norwegian landscape is just as diverse as the US landscape, come on.
> How could it possibly be? It’s one nation versus an entire continent.
How about Antarctica versus China? My money is on China.
> You cannot seriously claim that the Norwegian landscape is just as diverse as the US landscape, come on.
Good, because I didn't. I refuted your assumption that it isn't. It is or it isn't, who knows. And that greatly depends on your definition of "diverse". One person will see two landscapes and say they are different, another will say they're basically the same.
> How about Antarctica versus China? My money is on China.
Irrelevant, missing the point and patronizing.
> Good, because I didn’t. I refuted your assumption that it isn’t.
Yes, you refuted my assumption by claiming I can't prove it because I haven't been to either country, which is a ridiculous thing to say. It's not like you've been to the US either, have you? It didn't stop you from claiming that a drive across the US equals a "drive across the Bible Belt and then desert country"
And sure enough, I might very well change opinions after having driven through both nations, but this argument is about the most appealing of the two. You specifically use the word "dream" in the second paragraph of your blogpost.
> It is or it isn’t, who knows. And that greatly depends on your definition of “diverse”. One person will see two landscapes and say they are different, another will say they’re basically the same.
I'm not going to argue about the definition of the word diversity, frankly I think there's a fairly widespread consensus in place that regards the word an alternative of "significantly different"
So, for someone who has never been to either the US or Norway, which is going to look more appealing if diversity is what you're after? It can only be the US. Flat lands, river deltas, great lakes, mountains, the world's largest waterfalls, all those things number up to great diversity. Norway is diverse in a different way; surely glaciers, mountains and fjords are different from one another and all interesting in their own way, but they are variations of the same theme: a mountainous Nordic nation. You couldn't attribute a term like "Nordic" to the combined landscape of the US, could you? It's much too different for that to work. It ought to be, it spans across a continent and size matters greatly in this. You can't go from freezing temperatures to subtropic weather driving across the Netherlands; it's a paper round, and it's dull for it. Would you say driving across Norway is more diverse than driving from Norway to Greece? I very much doubt that.
"You should consider deleting this blogpost, you’re embarrassing yourself" Hey chill man, it's only a blog. No need to get all offensive :D Dunno about the backstabbing, but Martin has this opinion, so what? p.s. US is not an entire continent :p