As a German myself I think I can confidently say that most of my country-men don't have the slightest feeling for what "remote" actually means until they have actually been to some of these places outside of Europe. "Remote" to a German might mean that it takes more than 30 minutes to the next highway. "Remote" means that cell reception drops to 3G, or that there's only one gas station in a 20km radius. Lots of folks I knew always talked about going to the outback in Australia as their first major trip abroad, because "it's so remote". It's hard to convince them that there's "remote enough" and "way too remote". I know plenty of places, specifically in Canada and the US, where driving for ~ 60 minutes from a major city will get you somewhere remote enough that you won't spot another soul. This is hard to grasp for us Germans since there's basically no place in the whole country where you're truly by yourself. My two cents.
For me (fellow German) the first eye-opener was after arriving in LA and driving East along the I-10: first you drive for ~70 miles through the LA sprawl, then that peters out, then you reach Palm Springs, and then, after you have left that behind too, nothing (except for desert). The contrast between an agglomeration with 12.5 million people and the vast empty space right next to it is really fascinating...
Yep, I travel through the Sonora desert on a regular basis to visit family, most of the drive is just rocks and bare landscape. I always make sure to bring plenty of water on those drives in case the car breaks down or something.
It really is a feat of engineering when you think about it that highways were built and maintained over such vast distances and through some really inhospitable terrain. When driving that road I sometimes ponder what it was like building it.
Did you get a chance to drive around Nevada much? It's nearly as large as Germany, but has only two metropolitan areas, and outside of those ... very nearly nothing at all. There are signs warning that there's no petrol available for 160+km.
Also some of the best night sky in the country, and some areas are eerily still and quiet.
Broadly speaking, you have the Northeast Corridor, which is more or less a continuous conurbation from DC to Boston.
Outside of that, the Eastern US generally follows European models of density, with clear densely-populated urban regions (Chicago being the largest city, but more minor cities like Indianapolis or Dayton correspond well to minor urban centers in European countries, population wise), in a field of rural areas where there's basically a quantum of civilization anywhere the land is flat enough to actually support it. There's kind of omnipresent human presence in the rural areas of, say, Ohio (not unlike rural Netherlands, say), while the mountainous regions like West Virginia sees strips of small towns nestled in every river valley while the ridgelines are largely empty (like a lot of the Alps).
The boundary between rural-but-populated and rural-but-unpopulated in the US is not so much the Mississippi River, but the 100°W longitude line, the High Plains (or roughly a line running from Oklahoma City through Wichita and Omaha up to Winnipeg along I-29 and I-35). From here, there's basically nothing until you hit the Front Range and the beginning of the mountains.
Once you hit the Front Range and you look west, you're in a kind of combination of the previous two zones. There's again large urban centers. In some of the big valleys--Columbia, Snake, Central, and Willamette--you see basically a small slice of European-style omnipresent human presence in rural areas. But outside of these areas, the area is largely thoroughly unpopulated, more so than even the High Plains, due to either being a desert, mountainous, or both.
The Nevada section of US-50 is a particularly extreme case:
> In the stretch of highway between Fallon and Delta, Utah, a span of 409 miles (658 km), there are three small towns: Austin, Eureka, and Ely. This span is roughly the same distance as Boston, Massachusetts, to Baltimore, Maryland, or Paris, France, to Zürich, Switzerland.
Eyre Highway runs east from Norseman in Western Australia for 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) across the Nullarbor Plain to Ceduna, South Australia.
It then crosses the top of the Eyre Peninsula as it continues eastwards for 470 kilometres (290 mi), before reaching Port Augusta.
My wife and I drove that a few years ago on our NY-to-SF trip, and it was a truly memorable experience. And somewhere out in the desert you'd see a tiny wooden house left by a settler; we knew there was another town a few tens of miles further on and that we could be rescued if we broke down, but those early settlers... I can't get my head around that.
When I was 11 years old my (Australian) family took a trip to remote Western Australia. Because remote tourism was popular in Germany at the time, we heard a different variation of "German tourist does naive thing" in most the towns we visited. Occasionally it was American tourists instead. I think this was more reflective of the number of people from each country that came to the bush than any national trait, but the stories themselves were educational.
Highlights included going down the Tanami Track in a rental van during the wet season, taking nothing but a case of beer onto the 2000km 4wd-only Canning Stock Route[0] and getting bogged then rescued by a passing convoy, and walking down a seriously remote track for six hours with nothing but a day pack and a change of clothes then asking where "the next kiosk" was.
We were from a more built up area of Australia, so we had a good idea of what it was like in the really remote parts and prepared: two spare tires, spare bits and pieces like timing belts and radiator hoses, HF radio and an epirb, redundant water containers, checked in with the local police station to let them know our expected arrival dates, all the good stuff. It was still very strange being in a part of the world where people would stop if they saw you pulled over but not waving or signalling to them, because you might be in trouble and they knew there'd only be one or two cars a day. We were from an area of Australia where if you had a compass and followed any direction for a day or two on foot you'd eventually come to a road, but out there you could drive for a day and not see anything.
[0] The longest stock route in the world, and probably one of the worst roads in Australia, insofar as you can call it a road.
About a year after the Berlin Wall came down I spent months riding a bicycle around Germany, an Australian - I have never quite got over the experience of the condensed scale of Germany, that I could find a clump of forest to wild camp in (perhaps not legally) and when i woke, hop on my bike and in minutes buy breakfast. I could choose any road, and always found some where for lunch, and wasn’t once run off the road by a semi trailer
Hehe. One time I was in a ride share from Berlin to Essen.
"Where are you from"
I respond with something mid-western.
"How far from New York or LA is that?"
"I can drive a day in any direction and still be in the middle of nowhere".
It was cute to see the confused looks on everyones faces. I get it though, you drive a couple hours in any direction in Europe and you are likely to be in another country or a body of water.
