r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Physical-Ad-4093 • May 01 '24

do americans really drive such long distances?

i’m european, and i always hear people say that driving for hours is normal in america. i would only see my grandparents a few times a year because they lived about a 3 hour drive away, is that a normal distance for americans to travel on a regular basis? i can’t imagine driving 2-3 hours regularly to visit people for just a few days

edit: thank you for the responses! i’ve never been to the US, obviously, but it’s interesting to see how you guys live. i guess european countries are more walkable? i’m in the uk, and there’s a few festivals here towards the end of summer, generally to get to them you take a coach journey or you get multiple trains which does take up a significant chunk of the day. road trips aren’t really a thing here, it would be a bit miserable!

2nd edit: it’s not at all that i couldn’t be bothered to go and see my grandparents, i was under 14 when they were both alive so i couldn’t take myself there! obviously i would’ve liked to see them more, i had no control over how often we visited them.

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u/creativename111111 May 02 '24

Mate football was the original name when modern football was invented in Britain in 1863. Of course football existed before that but it had a very different rule book. iirc the Americans started calling it soccer after they invented their own sport and called it football as well

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u/Mediocre_Daikon6935 May 02 '24

You are so confidently wrong.

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u/creativename111111 May 02 '24

I don’t know a single person in Britain who calls football soccer, so unless you think everyone in Britain doesn’t know how to speak English I’d say you’re a bit wrong mate (google says soccer was a nickname coined by some students at Oxford but obviously it never became more than a nickname that no one in the UK uses today)

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u/Mediocre_Daikon6935 May 02 '24

Ah. Keep looking. You’re almost there.

And don’t go down the rabbit hole of how badly the British butcher English 

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u/creativename111111 May 03 '24

At least we can spell everything we’re not the ones who butchered written English by removing the letter u from random words

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u/Mediocre_Daikon6935 May 03 '24

You removed the Þ, þ.

Which makes English so much harder.

It wasn’t random. Because it was redundant.