One of the delightful bonuses of moving from a medium city to a small town is that it takes much less time to get anywhere.

Part of that, certainly, is having access to a car and roads without too much traffic on them. (Tonight I got caught in rush hour, which was a whole two blocks long.)

Or not having to get to and wait for and travel on public transportation. (There are public transportation options, but they take much less time.)

I’m a happy girl–I feel like I have hours and hours of my life back.

(Of course that’s less time spent listening to podcasts, but I’m sure I can make that up somehow.)

But while these distances and travel times have me absolutely happy, the locals have an entirely different view of things.

“I could go to Wal*Mart, but you have to drive forever to get there.”

It’s a 15 minute drive, max.

“That grocery store is in the next town over.”

The travel time happens to be the same amount of time it would take to drive from my parents’ house to their grocery store…in the same town.

If travel relativism is related at all to temperature relativism (in that the actual distance is objective but the perceived change in time or temperature is HUGE), that means I’ll adapt to this new way of transportation soon.

I wonder how long it’ll take before a 5 minute drive feels like a long time to me.

Wanna start a betting pool?