Cities and states have climates and cultures attached to their names, and then it's easy to get a totally incorrect idea of where it is. The same happens when you take a piece of a round globe and straighten it out on a two-dimensional map. We think of Canada as north, Mexico as south, and South America as far south of the United States. But that doesn't tell the whole story. Laurence Brown pulled out a US map to determine where our National Parks are because he got a calendar of park posters for Christmas. That's when he found that what we think of the 48 contiguous United States doesn't have much to do with where they actually are. Besides what's in the video, commenters added more geographic facts that may blow your mind.
If you go south from Detroit, you enter Canada.
Over half of Canada's population lives south of the entire states of Washington and North Dakota.
The Atlantic Ocean enters the Panama Canal from the west and goes east to enter the Pacific.
Boston is roughly on the same latitude as Barcelona.
The whole of the contiguous USA is further south than the whole of Britain.
New Orleans is about the same latitude as Cairo.
The International Date Line crosses Alaska, so it is both the westernmost and the easternmost state. (not true; see comments)
The state closest to Africa is Maine.
Tijuana is closer to North Dakota than it is to Mexico City.
Texarkana, Texas, is closer to Chicago than it is to El Paso.
Berlin is farther north than Winnipeg.
See, we've all been fooled by the weather and our own mental maps!
At some point I made a deliberate effort to remember that zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude was well off the bendy curve of Africa, since my head placed it somewhere on the Nile south of Cairo. I think that's because Egypt would be the bottom right of a map of European-centered geography, so (0,0) would be the corner.
Going to college in Tallahassee and driving to New Orleans gave me a visceral understanding of how long the panhandle it. The Central Time Zone starts shortly west of Tallahassee, but there's still a lot of Florida remaining before Alabama and Mississippi fly by.
For a Sweden quirk, it's about 1000 km from the south of Sweden to the north of Italy, while it's over 1500 km to the north of Sweden.
FWIW, the 180th meridian goes through Alaska. The International Date Line dodges around the state.
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