liminality

to put it into perspective. a ~2 hour flight from london to warsaw is like. 30 to 45 USD?

and a 2 hour flight from one US city to another would be about 130 USD

it was very cheap to fly here. i make over 100k USD now and i dont know if ill ever be able to afford leaving. if that gives you an idea of how prohibitive travel is here. i havent even touched on how the US has Zero guaranteed holidays by the govt. many people here go years without ever having an entire week off of work

like, before we moved in together, my husband used to visit me on long weekends by driving from New Hampshire to upstate New York, ~444 miles/715 km, or about a 7.5-8 hour drive. the drive from Brussels to Zürich is ~393 miles/632 km and about 7.5 hours long, and you'd go through Luxembourg and France on the way there.

I am considered very weird because I went to a fairly distant state for my university (and then a completely different one for law school and then a third state for my first job, each time with zero connections to those areas). a round trip flight from New Hampshire to Virginia, where my university was (~690 mi/1110 km), is currently starting at ~$500 and would be between 4 and 7 hours each way, since there's no direct flight between the two.

Not only because of the expense of travel, but because paid vacation time is...almost nonexistent here for regular people. When I learned that some people get multiple PAID weeks off from work at a time i was like "that doesn't sound right" I lowkey didn't even believe it

I saw the ocean when I was 4, when I was 12 and again this summer when I was 22 (I live 8.5 hours drive from the nearest ocean). A lot of the time in between, we either couldn't afford to vacation or just went to a neighboring state for a 3-4 day weekend. And that was only in times when our financial situation was good. When my dad was working a blue collar job? Lmao, vacations, what's that? And I've always lived in wealth compared to the way my appalachian mom grew up

Americans hope to travel when they retire (IF they retire and are not too disabled by the time they do...) and that's it.