A Single Small Map Is Enough for a Lifetime | Hacker News Reader

A Single Small Map Is Enough for a Lifetime

noemamag.com

128 pointsThevet108 comments

I grew up with no real sense of "home." I think probably because of that, traveling was never exciting for me. I did it. I spent months bouncing around various places, but it didn't feel like anything unusual to me. Each was just one more new place.

It wasn't until I turned 30 and abruptly made a decision to pick somewhere and stay there that I found the kind of satisfaction it seems like most people get from traveling. It's not challenging for me to adapt to new situations and experiences. It's challenging for me to navigate the depth of experience of the same people and the same places, day in and day out. It's especially challenging for me to face the depth of myself that I have encountered since deciding to put down roots.

It's a lot less glamorous to invest my time into trying to understand and solve local problems with local people than it would be to create highlight reels of exotic locations, but I feel like I'm growing more this way than I would otherwise.

It makes me think whichever type of experience you didn't grow up with might be the challenge you need as an adult. If you grew up with all the challenges of a small town people rarely leave and where everybody knows you, maybe you need the challenge of new places where nothing is familiar and you have to start all your encounters from scratch.

But if you didn't "belong" anywhere as a kid, maybe what you need to develop in adulthood is the opposite.

A thought-provoking comment; thanks for sharing it.

There is a parallel with personal relationships. Some people churn through relationship after relationship, always looking for a refresh on the exciting feeling of being with someone new and falling in love (or something like it).

Others find a person and settle down into a long term relationship and are happy with it. Sure, the thrill of a new relationship goes away pretty quickly, but if you are lucky enough to find the right person, that is OK. As the relationship goes on, that shared history builds into its own beautiful thing. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I've thought about it this way. Studies show how unreliable memory is (see the Challenger disaster memory study [1]), and if a memory is only in my head, I can't be sure it happened that way, and ignoring that issue, it feels kind of like knowing a joke that I can't share with anyone. But with a long-term relationship, all those trivial things of your life are shared with someone else who gets the references and jokes and callbacks, and it makes it more real; it confirms that I really did live that memory, and you get more value out of it than if it is lives only in your own head. This might not make sense to younger people, but at 60 it is becoming relevant to me.

Also, please don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying settle down for the sake of settling down. If you haven't found the right person, keep looking for them.

[1] https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2014/0128/Where-were-you-w...

> the thrill of a new relationship goes away pretty quickly

A few minutes ago, I hugged my wife (one of the simple pleasures of WFH!) and after remarking how good it always felt to do that, jokingly said, "after all this time, shouldn't I be indifferent to you?"

We've been together for 22 years.

She replied, "it's probably because I have a million different personalities."

Maybe to get that refresh it isn't necessary to meet a new person. Just to see the same person in a different way.

That last line is surprisingly congruent with the article. A bit less breadth, a bit more depth.

I've started my adult life with a conscious decision that I'd start my travels by visiting things close to home; my own province and my own country. There's so much beauty in Québec that most people don't know about: white sand beaches, breathtaking mountain ranges, quaint little villages, bustling downtowns, etc. At the height of the pandemic, we were in Tadoussac and my daughters were looking at a starfish in a tidal pool, and we heard someone say "I didn't know we had that in Québec".

Since then, I've traveled a bit further, but always with "slow" transportation: First by car, but more recently on my sailboat. Last year we went to the Bahamas via Nova Scotia and the US East coast, and it only made me appreciate home even more. I never realized how much I loved winter until I skipped one!

But yeah, picking a spot to live is an important step; one which I took at about 25. I'm now slowly realizing that all my interests (sailing, snowboarding) would probably be better served somewhere else, but I don't really want to start over. I live in a (very) small town where we all know each other, but it's very welcoming and there's a lot of "immigrants", so you don't have to have been born there to integrate.

I have left Quebec at the age of 22. It took me many years to realise how little I have seen of my home province. I was young, poor, busy, and for the most part without a car.

It's a beautiful province, and I wish I explored it more before I left. I try to repair that every time I visit, but there is never enough time and it's hard to get around without a ride.

Same here. I moved around a lot as a kid. New countries, new cities, new guardians. As an adult I just don't get satisfaction out of traveling. I have that same feeling of "just another place" when I travel.

I also really relate to that feeling of never belonging anywhere. It was only recently I realized how damaging that was. I never really invested in relationships with people because I always had the unconscious thought that they would be gone tomorrow. I'm trying to work on that now.

I also feel like I’m not from any place in particular but I’m now at a point where I’d like to settle.

I’ve moved countries a lot, my immediate family is all over the place and also moved quite a bit.

So how do you pick a place and country to live? Because all of Europe is an option, I’m lucky but also don’t know where (and how) to pick.

Could you share the insights if any you got from your experience settling someplace?

Similar path, similar conclusion here. I appreciate you verbalizing your thoughts.

Thanks for sharing this.

I'm curious – how did you decide where to put down roots, after all that travel? Someplace you visited and liked? A relationship or job?

I sat down with a map of the U.S., since that's where I'm a citizen. At the time, my parents were having health challenges, so I made a list of the cities from which I could fly directly to where they were living at the time (they're both much better now, thankfully). I wanted to live within an hour and a half or so from the airport, because any farther than that would be really inconvenient. This gave me a list of a couple dozen areas.

From there, I looked at weather. I despise being overly hot, especially (but by no means exclusively) if it's humid, but I don't mind the cold at all. I would miss snow if I didn't get it every year. That narrowed it down to about a dozen, if I remember correctly.

I prefer not to live in crowded places or dense cities, and this knocked a couple more places off the list (it's too dense for me almost everywhere within an hour and a half of JFK in NYC for example). I also wanted to be somewhere reasonably close to "stuff to do outside."

When I got it down to 6, I ranked them based on places I had some connection to and decided to go visit them all, looking for wherever felt like a good fit. I didn't make it past the first stop, though. I went and visited the place on the top of my list, which I had spent some time near before, met some like-minded people and moved three months later.

Ironically I'm not still in touch with the community I first wanted to connect with, but I got plugged into the area in other ways and made connections with other groups. After some immediate family chaos (several moves, a couple deaths, a divorce), my mom actually ended up moving out to the same area, and I think by now this has become "home."

Thank you. Indeed we are like-minded folk – I've followed nearly the same method, for much the same reasons.

Out of curiosity, how did you afford to travel so constantly? A life of constant travel would seem almost impossible to most people where I'm from.

It was something that happened to me as a child, not something I chose.

When I was an adult, I tried traveling on the cheap, as young folks do. Backpack and train passes. Hostels and couch surfing. My friends kept insisting I would fall in love with it eventually, but I never did. I'm quick to make shallow connections, but slow to make deep ones, and "shallow" and "empty" land pretty similarly for me.

I don't remember having major expenses. I had started working when I was 14 (mostly officiating sports for younger kids, which paid 4x the minimum wage in my area) and I never had expensive hobbies, so I had a little money, but it wasn't expensive to travel.

Perhaps different but connected - in my mid-30s I realized that I had "maxed out" travel. I was going to 20+ countries a year between work and pleasure and was super-confident that you can drop me anywhere in the world and I'll figure it out.

In contrast, I realized that I didn't have a ton of experience "staying." Naively, settling down, marrying, having kids, buying a house sounds "boring" compared to picking up and going to Senegal on a whim, but at this point of my life the boring was much more of the adventure and unknown than the whirlwind.

Looking back on it, I am definitely growing and learning much more from being a husband, a dad, a homeowner, neighbor, etc than I would from going on another 20 trips.

Now you get to combine the two when you start taking the family on some of those trips to share with your kids the perspective and situations of other people and places.

Would it have been different if you were required to live in the places you traveled to for a year each?

Its a different experience in the UK where trespass laws are so different. Here in the land of the free, where we value property rights over freedom of motion, we are restricted to explore only a fraction of the land around us. One man's freedom is another man's bonds.

In the US we also have the largest park system that is quite cheap/free. Not every area is covered with parks, but there are enough green spaces within a short distance (less than 1 hour) that exploring should be possible. Further, a lot of people will let you go on their land if you ask them and are polite about your time on their land. Regardless- I agree that we do not have it as fun as they do in the UK and some other areas that treat land like they do.

> there are enough green spaces

that's the point. America has green spaces, UK has country side, terroir if you will.

A green space is a delineated, commoditized destination. Drive there, park there, do your thing, go back. A country-side can be enjoyed through osmosis, even when living in the city.

They're qualitatively different.

There are also 300,000 square miles of national forest/grasslands which is 3x the size of the UK. All of which is freely available with the right to dispersed camping for up to 14 days at one spot, after which you must move camp 5 miles to camp more.

Opinions on property rights aside there is no lack of land to explore and enjoy.

Aside from there there are also state parks and forests, though the states define their own terms of use and enjoyment around them.

I'm not disagreeing. I'm just saying that they are a qualitative different experience, to the senses, in the way they are integrated in daily life.

How popular is frequenting other peoples land for outdoor experiences? Genuinely curious, as I have heard about the lack of trespassing laws many times over the years, and know little about the experiences the UK countryside has to offer. Like what activities and locations do people partake in. Is it thing like hiking and waterway activities?

> Like what activities and locations do people partake in.

It's less about delineated activities (which are a number, countable, very modernist), and more the day2day enjoyment of nature, as it bleeds through city life, you don't necessarily seek it out, it just happens (which can't be put into a number, can only be waxed rhapsodically about, very humanist). It's visiting family one town over, leaving your city house and smelling cow shit as you bike there. It's a train commute and seeing the fog roll over centuries year old pastures on the way. It's eating venison in a tavern restaurant in fall, and was shot by the local hunter's club. It's a date that starts as a forest hike in the afternoon and imperceptibly blends into a pub crawl at night.

I live in a city of a state which is by all accounts rugged and rustic, in close proximity to wilderness, parks, farmland, etc... but there's a clear separation of intent. When I lived in Europe, the enjoyment of nature was more through a surrounding vapor, unconscious.

I'm not saying that one is necessarily worse, but to me the experience is starkly different, and that difference can't be captured in numbers.

It's also a spectrum, location dependent, ymmv, blah blah etc..

This has been the hardest adjustment for me moving from Montana to the deep South. The south has definite advantages for me at this point. Stability, easier growing crops and animals, better infrastructure, etc. But not being able to just walk all over the place is hard. It was a lot easier to get away and I definitely feel claustrophobic (some of it is no mountains). I know opportunities here are better for my family but I miss home.

Let's also not forget BLM land, where Americans can and do load up a F150 Raptor and run 90 mph across the desert, camping anywhere they want, shooting semiautomatic rifles into the air freely, living out their freedom fever dreams. Try doing that in the UK.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) even has a portal with maps

https://www.blm.gov/maps/georeferenced-PDFs

BLM land is a million square kilometers. That's about ten times the size of the UK.

There is something to be said for the UK traipsing laws from time immemorial - because you can explore something other than a million square kilometers of mostly unused land.

This is what I'm doing this weekend. I'm not even joking, headed to Moab.

It seems to me that the difference is that public land and national parks are more or less devoid of people while countryside is a combination of nature and people. There's lots of nature to explore but it's full of ancient cemeteries, small communities, farms, hills with various legends attached to them, etc.

To me there has to be the people to give the nature significance. Otherwise it's not so much exploration as it is just a massive camping trip.

Roughly 40% of the United States is public land and there are national parks larger than some European contries. Sure, it's not freedom to roam, but you still have access to significantly more public land living in the United States than you would living in the UK.

This is where statistics can really blind you, a majority of that is out west. Major population centers are on the coast. So you would still need to burn jet fuel to get there in a reasonable time frame.

This may come as a surprise to you, but one of the coasts with several population centers is also out west.

The majority may be there, but there are still many scattered throughout the country.

FFS, there's a National Park in New York City: Gateway National Recreation Area. At least I hope it's still there: used to go mountain biking there a long time ago.

Most of my vacations in the last several years have been to do with state parks in the Southeastern US. We've been to several in Georgia, Alabama, and North and South Carolina. In a lot of these cases, we would stage at one park (or in some cases, not-a-park) for several days and go out to another place or park each day.

I've lived in Georgia for most of my 40 years, and most of these parks I had never heard of until we went there. I think almost every single one has been a really good experience. And it's very affordable for my family of 5. We don't have to go far. They're all a little bit different.

I've seen Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon, and other sites of note in the US. They are really neat, and can be worth the trip. But I'm pretty sure at this point that I'll never even see everything that my home state has to offer in my lifetime, so I'm pretty content to stick to reasonable driving distance.

For those Americans among us, there is an interesting short Patagonia adventure film about this in Scotland called "Right to Roam."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilmhR_EgK8Y

Depends on where you live. There are huge swaths of public land in the US where anyone is allowed to hike, explore, camp, hunt, or just shoot guns into the dirt. There are also many State and National parks which are cheap or free to visit.

But yes, once a private entity owns the land in the US you'll need permission to do anything.

Information about "freedom to roam" in different countries and regions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam

I don't fully understand this idea. In the UK I can just point in a direction and walk unrestricted anywhere i want? Through peoples farms, yards, castle grounds, etc?

You can in Scotland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Outdoor_Access_Code

In the rest of the UK, it's a little more complicated (for now): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#England_and_Wa...

You can’t literally go anywhere but there a varying degrees of Right To Roam here.

We have an extensive network of public foot paths and bridal ways that private land owners aren’t allowed to block if they go across their land. There are several through sheep fields, cow fields, crop fields and even a couple of stable fields where people keep their horses with a 5 minute walk of my house.

The closest the US has is easements and private roads - there are various laws and regulations around them, but in general if you're not being an ass and you're headed to public land (or especially to land you own or have permission to access) you'll be allowed to pass.

There's a fight going on around "corner cutting" - https://earthjustice.org/experts/tom-delehanty/wyoming-court...

And even if you make a mistake and stray off the official path you are extremely unlikely to be shot.

You are extremely unlikely to be shot in the United States as well. Just because the media blows up statistically ridiculously unlikely incidents in a country of 340 million people does not mean it's magically likely to happen to you.

I can't believe this actually needs to be said.

I don’t think it did need to be said tbh. In the UK there’s the joke of “careful or the farmer will shoot you” said to kids and youngsters just to scare them a bit. I imagine that’s where the commenter was coming from.

>I imagine that’s where the commenter was coming from.

Not really :)

However I had just read this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-68077595

People online also love to stereotype Americans as trigger-happy psychopathic maniacs.

Instead, you are extremely likely to be declined a cup of tea...

Sweden has a similar right to roam called "Allemansrätten" that allows people to go cross-country through private natural lands as long as they follow a handful of guidelines. I think it's generally that the traveler needs to stay out of private gardens, off farmland, away from homes, and not despoil the land. There is so much open land in Sweden that it's pretty simple to achieve all of these goals just a few dozen kilometers outside Stockholm (my opinion: I haven't actually tried it).

For england, wales and NI; No, but there are plenty of public walkways that cross private land, they're almost always marked with signs, although farmers have been known to make such signposts magically disappear.

The end result is that you can essentially 'point in a rough direction' and walk however far you want, however not just on any part of the land. A good OS map, analog or digital, helps.

Unfortunately in my area of the USA south, there simply isn't much free land to explore. We have contained city parks and a few state parks. Less than 2% of all land in state. Everything else is either developed or privately owned.

"I studied my map for a while and found what appeared to be its most boring grid square: no roads, houses or rivers, just a single footpath, one pond and the merest flutter of a lonely contour line. Here, it seemed, was nothing at all, neatly outlined within crisp blue lines."

Near me that boring grid would almost certainly be fenced off. Untouchable.

Your mileage may vary, but my experience in the South was that most people (especially people with a few to many acres) don't care if you use their land if you ask. I've hunted or fished on a few strangers' land. I've used land I didn't own without asking, but did live in the neighborhood and the woods were largely considered communal if people weren't jackasses.

A lot of people own land because they want access to it, not because they want to deny everyone else access. Just go up to the nearest house and ask if you can walk through their land, or if they know who owns it so you can ask. People are generally nice about it.

You can also largely ignore corporate ownership of large swaths of land for stuff like logging or mining. They don't monitor it, and are unlikely to make a big deal of a hiker crossing through if you don't walk directly through the part they're working.

There's a greater conversation about private ownership and access to nature, but asking is a practical workaround in the mean time.

> Just go up to the nearest house and ask if you can walk through their land, or if they know who owns it so you can ask.

This doesn't seem like such a great idea these days, with armed people holed up on their property thinking they are "under siege" when someone accidentally enters their property[1][2][3]. People are too unhinged to risk knocking on a random door.

1: https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/23/us/new-york-man-found-guilty-...

2: https://abcnews.go.com/US/gps-mistake-allegedly-leads-deadly...

3: https://www.wrdw.com/2023/11/03/texas-man-convicted-manslaug...

Yeah... Unfortunately the advice becomes much less good when you aren't white.

Be careful with corporate land. Find Weyerhaeuser recreation (in the south primarily for hunting not grazing like BLM out west) here... https://recreation.weyerhaeuser.com/Leases/Search Note: Weyerhaeuser combined with Plum Creek.

Corporate ownership rings true. Especially land marked off for future development. You'll likely need to jump a fence, but no one is watching once you're inside.

Private land I'm more concerned about simply due to firearm ownership & laws surrounding it. I'm sure many citizens would welcome respectably sharing. There's just no way to know that in advance and the downside risk feels higher than I'm willing to accept.

"How come kids don't go outside anymore?"

Then you look outside and it's nothing but 4-lane stroads, fast food places, payday loan/pawn shops, and liquor stores. Where the fuck are the kids meant to go, the local casino?

I believe the system and those who pull the levers currently would prefer if the kids were in juvenile detention(1) or working low wage jobs at risk of their own health safety and future(2). Might be better off with the casino option.

1: https://ips-dc.org/whos-profiting-americas-private-juvenile-... 2: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/27/1172544561/new-state-laws-are...

The success of Minecraft proves that the children yearn for the mines.

I thought about the same thing. Trying this in the US would be a recipe for getting shot.

Even in the national parks? And what about Canada?

In USA National Parks & National Forest are open for exploration. I'm incredibly grateful for the park service maintaining them.

Unfortunately, their locations are not evenly distributed. They are highly concentrated in the Western portion of the country. The closest national park to me is 8+ hours away.

Found this map on a quick search: https://preview.redd.it/public-land-of-us-texas-is-surprisin...

National Parks in the US are typically vast open spaces far away from where most people live.

Canada has the advantage of a ton of crown land.

Illegal activity is as American as apple pie. I don't have much free land around me and I have a lot of fun going into abandoned buildings despite it's own set of hazards such as asbestos and mold.

Deep South here as well. This place absolutely sucks for exploring. Dangerous heat, mosquitos galore, "nature trails" often have pictures of hunters on government sites. I need to freaking leave.

It used to be that travel was expensive, difficult, long, and rare.

Traveling 20 to 30 miles was doable, but rarely done, so if you did it you'd find quite a different area.

As travel became more possible (first powered boats, then trains) areas became more similar as people moved about. But it was still quite different to go from New York to Boston, even.

Planes shortened it even more; but the real shortening was mass-market communication - radio and then television, and the complete cultural domination of the United States.

Now I can travel thousands of miles in mere hours, to visit someplace that every year feels more and more like I've not really left home.

You can still experience difference, even in the USA, but you have to work much harder at it now.

I've been doing variations on this for decades. I'm fortunate enough to live in a rural area in the US with open space within walking distance, but I've done it in urban areas too. Some ideas:

- Walk every road and alley in a small town. - Bicycle every unpaved road in an entire county. - Follow every trail in a park. - In an unfamiliar city, try to walk to destinations with minimal map or GPS use. This can occasionally lead to feeling unsafe, so use care. Before ubiquitous GPS, I used to carry a compass everywhere to help with this. - Pick a direction and walk for a fixed amount of time, then come back a different way. I once walked 50 blocks in NYC this way during a business trip.

A friend of mine has spent many years hiking to the top of every publicly accessible peak visible from a hill near his house and has had some wild adventures as a result.

As someone reaching 40 myself, it's funny the author doesn't realize they are just getting older. Not all, but most people, as they age, start to lose that wanderlust that they had in their youth. Like the author I have been on many adventures and across many countries, and I will still do a lot more of it. But as I get older I feel the pull far less than I did when I was younger.

Good observation!

It seems that in your 20s there's an inclination towards inspiration: exploring the world, ideas, and oneself.

However, post-30s, particularly when you've settled down and had children, the focus often shifts to cultivating your surroundings; Integrating the values and insights acquired to foster a more beautiful, safer pleasing home environment and community.

So a next step for the writer would be to step into a more active role, like conservation of some of the parts on his map. I think that would bring even more happiness.

The article mentions buying a custom map for a portion of the UK but then didn't mention the website. For anyone else curious about a custom map for a part of the UK here is the site: https://shop.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/custom-made/

And, if you're in the US: https://store.usgs.gov/maps

I used to fly all over the world pre covid and that has since come to a halt.

Over the pandemic I started just roadtriping in California and after 3 years of that I realized I could spend the rest of my life just going to new places here.

About 25 years ago, I threw together a program to create my own maps from Google maps. After specifying a rectangular border and level of detail, the software proceeded to fill a directory with small maps that would be stitched together. This technique allowed me to explore my surroundings in a similar manner, and I was amazed at what was to be found. If you're into walking / hiking, it is especially useful.

These days I annotate my maps and keep them on a local device. Perhaps someone could suggest software for personal use that would allow non-programmers to create their own maps.

Highly inspiring article that will get many of us to explore locally no doubt. Another idea to minimize expense and impact on the planet is virtual tourism. Explore via the internet. There are an infinite number of possible tours you can take for free in and on your own time. You can invent a theme, such as following Alistair Humphrey's travels, or Michael Palin's Around the world or Pole to Pole and so on. Lewis and Clark. Captain Cook. Marco Polo. Darwin and The Beagle.

Small discovery is highly underrated. Reminds me of how earlier London taxi license required the "Knowledge" a deep understanding of routes and wayfinders.

It reminds me of one of my favourite quotes:

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Elliot

If we promoted less car infrastructure and more spaces to walk exploration would be built in to our lives instead of requiring ….another car trip.

> It showed an area totaling just 20 square kilometers, a tiny place. The map was divided into 400 individual grid squares, outlined in light blue — a single square kilometer each.

He means 20 kms squared, as opposed to 20 square kilometers. The map should be 80cm x 80cm then.

For a smaller scale of this kind of thing if you live in a city, pick up a game like Ingress or Pokemon Go or one of its many offshoots and just walk to the next node. I found loads of really interesting spots like that, like a quiet graveyard just off the city center.

There is also a thing called Geocaching (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching) which basically is a world-wide treasure hunt.

I went looking for geocaches around my house when I was youger, and even nowadays when I have to wait for a train for one hour or two in city I've never been, I usually go looking for caches around the train station.

A deacon I know is making it his goal to walk down every street in his city. It takes a surprisingly long time to meet this goal, even in a small town.

Check this out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34168284

At the risk of being part of the problem: gosh that sounds terribly boring.

I’m glad the author finds enjoyment in that kind of adventure but after 10 minutes my brain would be wishing for a mountain bike trail to ride down, a rocky outcrop to climb, or simply some sun and blue sky.

> I’m glad the author finds enjoyment in that kind of adventure

From the author's bio:

"He has bicycled around the world, walked across southern India, rowed across the Atlantic, run six marathons in the Sahara and trekked 1,000 miles through the Empty Quarter. He was named one of National Geographic’s adventurers of the year in 2012."

He was also like you before.

I guess I'm the opposite. I find travel to be highly overrated. If you're going to visit someone, that's one thing. But just to go somewhere and wander around, nah. I don't find any happiness doing that.

The interesting part to me was that the author spent 20+ years traveling around, and started to reduce the distances only "in recent years".

How long will they keep enjoying these distance limited, more local discoveries ? Will they progressively expand back and buy a boat when their kids leave home ? I don't know if people who fundamentaly enjoyed change will be able to fit in a box for the rest of their life.

One of the opening quotes says that one mountain range is enough for a lifetime. You just need to move out of the prairie...

That’s fair, but he’s not in a mountain range, he’s in a small flat part of the UK

If it was, we'd still live like most humans throughout human history, live and die within a few kilometers of where they were born. As a homebody, single floor plan is enough for a lifetime. For a Hikikomori, a single room. Until it isn't.

I bought his book the other day I kind of liked the idea.

Coincidentally, his pictures remind me very much of the time I tried to walk from Cambridge to Ely

Minnesota? How long did that take?

Cambridge, England to Ely (also England) is about 17 miles. Not an everyday trip but very feasible for an experienced or determined walker. People quite often cycle it. It's also extremely flat.

Ah, I see.

Cambridge, MN to Ely, MN is a bit longer, 203 miles, to be precise. Hence my surprise. https://maps.app.goo.gl/2U99gUwjmxhNjuNF7

UK. They are a lot closer together…

I think that could be a pretty interesting walk itself though!

I like this, sometimes a small map is enough for a lifetime. I’ve only seen a small part of the world and it is enough for me

Reminds me of Square Mile Living based on the book Your Money Or Your Life by Vicki Robin/Joe Dominguez.

The further you go, the less you know.

I agree with this, but so few people seem to like it. International travel is such a luxury and costs so much carbon. It's my goto example of something I would outlaw since it doesn't affect me, and there's no "real" reason for it. Of course, my libertarian sensibilities don't let me actually advocate for it, but I think about it when people want to outlaw marijuana, abortion, drinking, cars, guns, or whatever activity people other than themselves want to participate in. It's too easy to see the costs and not the benefits when it's someone else's activity.

But I really do think we'd be better off of more people voluntarily explored around their own home rather than taking far off vacations. Having lived in several countries and traveled to many more in my younger days (yes, I know, I'm a hypocrite), I don't find short travel visits to really help understand other cultures in any meaningful way like people like to claim. Extended visits or living there for several months or years does non-trivially change your perspective, though. As long as the place is substantially different and you make real connections with people.

>I agree with this, but so few people seem to like it.

You won't see many adverts or travel programs on TV suggesting you go for a ten mile hike starting from your front door. Vast amounts of money are being spent to encourage you to get on a plane and 'explore the world'.

O_O

Why in the world would you ever ban international travel????

Out of all the opinions I've read on HN, that must be the most insane one....

As someone who basically lives the lifestyle of a digital nomad, and has been internationally traveling since I was a kid, I think it's the one thing people should do more of.

the pictures clearly don't do the idea justice

one is led to believe visiting electric pylons is the new 'adventure'

unless ...

This exact cynicism is what he pushes against.

We can collect superlative pictures of unique places-- sometimes jostling among hundreds of tourists to do so. There's certainly joy in this.

But we can also let our curiosity be engaged, and find surprise and wander right next door.

So post some photos of dragonflies darting across a small pond, rays of sunshine piercing the forest canopy to glow fresh bluebells, etc, etc.

There are myriad pleasures in easy reach, but Pylons? Sure they can be attractive, but maybe aren't the best way to convey the message.

Unless... it's the Powerline trail in Kauai. Then my friends and family will think I'm special for having visited there.

https://www.alltrails.com/trail/hawaii/kaua-i--2/powerline-t...

Well, to me the "unless..." is doing some heavy lifting. I run under electric pylons nearly every day (there is a soft surface trail under the power lines). Sure, they're man-made, represent civilization, or whatever. But they're there, and that's part of the adventure, too. The pylons are in a different setting nearly every day, be it fog or sun, or just the usual PNW drizzle. And really, how often have you taken a good look at those pylons? How often are you even near them? How they're built, how would you put one together, how heavy are those power lines? Anyone with an engineering mindset could ponder those pylons for quite a while.

And despite all of that "civilization", I see deer, coyotes, and a beer on very rare occasions. Despite using that trail for over twenty years, it's a new adventure every time I go down it.

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