Has Anyone Seen My Spoons?

Houlton, ME to San Diego, CA (both US cities) takes 50 hours to drive with no stops. That's one of the most extreme cases, but I just don't think that Europeans realize how truly massive this country is.

Also, many people who live close to Canada have made the trip in at some point. Same with Mexico. It's just that an abysmally small number of Americans live as close to these countries as most Europeans live to two countries over. Those two are also very large countries, so it's not easy to just travel through them and go somewhere else.

The US just doesn’t have the extreme budget airlines Europe does (even Spirit Airlines, may it rest in pieces, was nowhere near the low price point of something like RyanAir. I got a RyanAir flight from Ireland to Denmark once for €14- meanwhile I’d consider a $114 domestic flight cheap in the US).

A "fetish" can be when you fixate unduly on an object and end up worshiping the object rather than what it represents or what it's made up of, so your fixation bears no fruit

It's not really a problem if an author gets off on what they're writing, the author's feelings about a subject aren't inherently an obstacle

But treating a specific theme or topic as one-note, so that your portrayal of it is one-dimensional and unnuanced? That IS an artistic obstacle