h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello Halavana! Welcome to h2g2!

Seems like your town and mine have something in common: people with a double case of wanderlust and homesickness.

You can have a read about my hometown here, if you like:

http://www.h2g2.com/A240058

If your hometown is New Plymouth New Zealand, we may very well have common ground. The plains can be a lot like an island, especially when all the air carriers charge almost twice as much to fly out of here as they do from Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Denver or Dallas. Irksome. Very irksome. I'm very glad driving is an option.

Oh, yeah, that sounds real familiar. Driving is usually the cheaper option compared to flying. Until you get to the Cook Strait which separates the two main islands. I had fly down to Invercargill (which is at the southern most tip of the country, and on the South Island as opposed to the North Island, where I live), a distance of about 1300 kilometres or 800 miles. There and back it cost the best part of $1600 NZ (I guess about $1000 US).

straits do make driving more difficult, don't they. Is there a ferry boat? Cook strait doesn't look so wide on my antiquated globe, but in real km, that 2mm can be quite a distance.

It's not that big of a crossing, and there are ferries of varying speeds, for those who want to be there yesterday or those who want to take in the scenery. It's been a while since I've been on one, but long are the memories of sitting in a fully-packed car in the middle of summer waiting for hours to be ushered onto the ferry. There was only one trip I didn't feel seasick, and I ate three NZ Railways (ferry owners at the time) meat pies.

If you ever get a chance to see the NZ movie "Goodbye Pork Pie" (and chances are slim of this happening) it has a scene in which the main protagonists make the Wellington-Picton crossing (which makes it unique for a buddy-road movie).

The only ferry I've ever ridden was across the Mississippi River at New Orleans, LA. Not very eventful, except several weeks later that same boat crashed into the peer. At least I think it was the same boat. I doubt the two events were related.
Usually if there's a choice between flying or taking a boat, I've decided to fly. Visited two islands off the coast of Taiwan. Can you see one island across the strait from the other? It's hard for people born land-locked to imagine that much water since we have to go so far to see it and being out of sight of land can be pretty unnerving the first time out.