{"id":2051,"date":"2004-07-17T19:37:00","date_gmt":"2004-07-17T23:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles-wp\/?p=2051"},"modified":"2004-07-17T19:37:00","modified_gmt":"2004-07-17T23:37:00","slug":"big-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/2004\/07\/17\/19\/37\/big-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Country"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just finished driving 3,900 km (2,400 miles<\/a>)  from San Francisco to Sylvania<\/a>. Left on Wednesday, arrived today. Drove through three time zones. Saw lots of landscape. I now have a visceral feel for how wide North America is in physical terms. If you are around 2 metres tall (6 feet), then given perfect visibility a flat horizon is around 5 km distant<\/a> (3 miles<\/a>). So assuming we drove pretty much west to east along I-80 (which is pretty accurate), then our journey consisted of fixing on a spot on the horizon and driving to it, then repeating that process 780 times. I have now seen a lot of desert, an enormous plume of dust and smoke from a giant forest fire burning near us, the weirdly horrible salt marshes and ancient dead lake beds of Utah, the upended vast sandstone fossil beds of Utah and Wyoming, the windsscoured Burren<\/a>-like alientated Wymoming plains, lots of extraordinary mesas, the improbable vastness of Nebraska, and lots and lots of heavily federal subsidized corn welfare crops growing in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.
\n 
\nMore later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just finished driving 3,900 km (2,400 miles)  from San Francisco to Sylvania. Left on Wednesday, arrived today. Drove through three time zones. Saw lots of landscape. I now have a visceral feel for how wide...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t