The US tends to be a lot more spread out than Europe and the rest of the world. It seems like we’re also more likely to move long distances for jobs and the like.
I’m pretty close to most family, 10 to 40 minute drives for everyone that doesn’t live out of state
We’re on different coasts.
Amateurs
I live in Australia
Part of my family is in South America
The other part is in Europe
(I know it’s a US community but it was hard to not flex)
Have you ever managed to get everyone together in one place?
I moved over 1,000 miles away to escape the hellish politics of my home state. My family all hates the politics there, too, but not enough to up and move.
About 3h30 by train (2 changes), roughly 350km
In the UK
Edit: lol, just seen the community name. Well here’s an unsolicited outsider perspective
It’s good you clarified the UK. 3h30 on a train in the US gets you to about the next town over 😢
It’s not quite that bad, but I’ve really wanted to take Amtrak cross country, which should in theory be easy to do because of all our open land. And yet, it would take like a week or something ridiculous like that.
If I lived in mainland Europe the journey would probably be a bit quicker for a journey of similar distance, everything seems to go via London in this country and we’ve got some creaking infrastructure. However I’ve heard the trains in the US are particularly under funded, so this might be a tiny violin situation
For the last 13 years we lived about 2500 miles apart. You can make the drive in 4 days driving about 10 hours a day.
We recently moved back to our home state though, so it’s about 30 minutes drive to my in laws and 2 hours to my mom’s now
oh please, 2 days, for a measly 10 hour drive? that can’t be further than 700 miles, lol. I make a 15 hour drive (~roughly 980miles) yearly for our family Xmas get together.
granted that IS mostly just all flat land and pastures but still, put on an audiobook or two and you’re there before the second one ends lol
Too damn close sometimes.
I loved my parents when they still lived, and will love their memory until my last day. But I was glad to live a few hours away by car.
Not far enough
>1000 miles (that’s 1600 km to “edumacashiated” people) so ~2 days drive (or one REALLY long haul). And other family is 3x as far away. The USA is freaking YUGE!
My mother is about 20 to 40 minutes away, depending on traffic. My identical twin is in the same household.
Every single other person I might be related to is likely several hundred miles away, unsure. I only saw them all like 2 times. A family reunion on each side of the family.
Depends on which parts of the family.
Most of the people on my dad’s side are within an hour drive. Most of my mom’s side is technically in another state, but it’s only about a two hour drive. It would be less, but the fucking mountains.
Farthest away in state is a solid 3 hour drive. But, again, there’s people in another state that are closer as the crow flies, but across the mountains so that it would take an extra hour just to get to where you could drive to them. It’s one of those things where you can’t get there from here, you have to go somewhere else first.
But I can hop on my scooter and be at my sister’s in maybe five minutes. It’s walking distance if you can walk that kind of distance in the first place. My brother is maybe a half hour drive.
About 80 mins from my parents, an hour from my in-laws, and 45 mins from my brother-in-law and his wife & kids. All of my other family are farther away and irrelevant anyway.
If my parents and in-laws were younger, my husband and I probably would’ve left the country by now, but our parents are aging and they need us within driving distance.
My family has spread out a ton, so for me the closest is a cousin about two hours away, but for my immediate family its 10-12 hours.
Most of the family I grew up with live close together on the west coast of the US.
Oldest brother lives in the house my father built for us. My parents live in the house my father built for his mother. My other siblings live within 5 miles.
My family and I live in Europe, lol.
If you only count first cousins and closer, there’s only a few that you can’t reach in a day’s drive. Most of those are within a half hour to 45 minutes. Depends on traffic and road conditions.
The closest of those is my mom and sister, and that’s maybe five minutes away by car.
If you go out a level of kin, the closest is still in state, but all the way on the other side, that’s my grandmother’s great nephew, whatever the fuck that amounts to is the kinship chart.
But we’re right up in the mountains, and as a whole, we’re less bound by state than we are by basically being mountain folk. Both sides of my family have lived in or close to the Appalachians going back into the 1800s. At least the branches that kept records. We tend to not give a fuck about what state we’re in as much as which side of the mountains because that’s a bigger barrier to visiting someone.
brothers in the same town, sister is one over, two others in same region but far out hours. same with in laws. cousins about as far while others are in other states. brother in another country.