Your Personal Geographic Extremes

[Toy Revolver]

if you see a black person it's probably dc

[jadis]

Haven't been to Seattle but Portland has some black people. Still much more homogenous than the average city on the east coast for sure

[Toy Revolver]

Haven't been to Seattle but Portland has some black people. Still much more homogenous than the average city on the east coast for sure

yeah i lived in portland

half joking

it was segregated as all fuck compared to atlanta but the portland liberals sure had their opinions about the south and apparently didn't have many mirrors

[jadis]

I've an outsider's perspective, obv, but I love the old PNW. It's beautiful and has its own vibe (and I'm not talking about that cutesy sketch show set in Portland). Esp for those of us who love the weather

Yeah it's still in the old US of A with all the attendant bs but it's also different

[Lisnaholic]

if you see a black person it's probably dc

Thanks for that travel tip: very useful for when I'm not sure which side of the USA I'm in.

Personal Safety: Where and why have you felt most at risk? 

Maybe this is a trickier question than I thought. Not "at risk of personal safety", but I was once in a bind in Greece.

Me and a friend were travelling in a battered old Bedford camper van, and parked off-road overnight in some hills, just pulling off the road where we saw a bit of flat ground. Van wouldn't start the next morning, but luckily my friend knew a bit about car mechanics, and identified the problem: "We need a new one of these" he said, and gave me some piece that revolves in the ignition cycle I think. So, with zero Greek, I managed to hitch the 20 miles to the nearest town, find the piece, and even find the van again although it was completely dark by the time I was hitching back: like rural darkness, that tbh, I don't experience very often.

Thank you, Greece, for being friendly to hitchhikers and for, beyond expectations, having spare parts for one of these :- 

[Toy Revolver]

Personal Safety: Where and why have you felt most at risk? 

so many it's ridiculous

i don't know if this counts because i lived there and it was one of many but i was 16 or 17 and driving alone in atlanta and got lost

my car was on e and i only had like a little change

it was night and there were no white people at all

i had a leather cassette holder and i sold it to a stranger for $5 and back then that was enough to drive some distance

i managed to get very specific directions to a famous mall that i knew the way home from

back then that was definitely a life or death deal

[Lexi Darling]

Most at risk, huh?

Well, for one thing, I don't travel much at all these days, if you know anything about me you'll know that I'm a bit of a homebody. I've been privileged enough throughout my life to not really have to get involved in dangerous situations.

So I guess as far as the risk of direct physical harm goes it would be the time my appendix came close to rupturing in the spring of 2017, right here in Madison Wisco. So not a very exotic answer but that's about the most accurate answer I can give.

[Toy Revolver]

i went to nepal while they were having a civil war

i was sharing a hotel room with another tourist and he ended up in bed with a woman and i asked if they wanted privacy and they said yeah

it was pitch black outside and took much longer to find another hotel than i expected

i was walking alone in the dark for a couple hours until i found a hotel that wasn't gated up

my life actually might have been more up my alley if i had been kidnapped by the maoist revolutionaries however

maybe the real danger was finding the shelter

[jimmy jazz]

Probably the non white areas of Birmingham tbh.

Shit happens in other places but its only a matter of time before you're targeted in some places. Anyone from here knows the areas to avoid.

[Lisnaholic]

Thanks for sharing your stories - especial thanks to Mrs. Waffles, who resisted the temptation to spice the story up a bit. Next time, Mrs. Waffles, you should say that you were paddling through the Upper Amazon in a leaky canoe when the appendix crisis began.
(I'm very glad of course that you got medical attention in time, as I've heard that an appendix problem can be really painful, and deteriorate really fast.)

@jimmy jazz and @Toy Revolver: feeling vulnerable because of skin colour is not good, wherever you are on the colour spectrum and I'm especially sorry that it can happen in (UK's) Birmingham. I've either been lucky or willfully blind, but I've never had that experience.

i went to nepal while they were having a civil war

i was sharing a hotel room with another tourist and he ended up in bed with a woman and i asked if they wanted privacy and they said yeah

it was pitch black outside and took much longer to find another hotel than i expected

i was walking alone in the dark for a couple hours until i found a hotel that wasn't gated up

my life actually might have been more up my alley if i had been kidnapped by the maoist revolutionaries however

maybe the real danger was finding the shelter

yeah, I remember those kind of adhoc sleeping arrangements that arise when young people are travelling on a low budget.

[Lisnaholic]

East and West: I thought these two extremes could go together because, as F Magellan discovered, if you go far enough West you'll end up in the East. If anyone wants a quick reminder, it works like this:-

So this question is a kind of three-in-one:

What place is the furthest East you have travelled? What place the furthest West?
Geography nerds only: Work out how many orange segments of the globe you have travelled across, out of a possible max of 360, like Magellan.

[Guybrush]

Koh Samui, an island in Thailand, was probably the furthest east I've been. West it's New York. I'd love to see more of the US.

[Toy Revolver]

california coast and japan coast

[Psy-Fi]

The furthest West I've been so far is Portland, Oregon. The furthest East I've been so far is Amsterdam, Netherlands.

[Lexi Darling]

Furthest west would be Los Angeles, where I visited some friends in 2019.

Furthest east would be New York City, which I have been to many times (my mom is from there), most recently being a vacation in summer 2016.