5300 miles equals what, hive mind?

January 4, 2008 9:13 PM

Where else could my dog and I have driven 5300 miles to?

There are a plethora of "calculate distance between point a and point b" websites. But, what if I want to find out the geographic circumference of a circle with radius 5300 miles? So, essentially I want to pretend I can drive across any surface (earth, water, space etc) in a 5300 mile straight trajectory from point US zipcode 48912. Where would I be? If not that specific then how about a calculation of 5300 miles = the linear distance between commonly known point a and commonly know point b.

Back story for those interested:

Spent my two week holiday break driving all over hell (MI to northern CA, northern CA to NM, NM to MI) with my dog. Ended up logging 5300+ miles. I can understand it in terms of the path I took. I want to try to conceptualize this many miles in the terms of other distances. I realized it was a long distance while watching the rose bowl parade and al roker noted that the hawaiian h.s. marching band had traveled 2400 miles and the ecuadorian band had gone a 2100 miles by bus. i would have preferred to have "driven" to either of these places.

posted by Dr. Lurker to grab bag (11 answers total)

This question might be helpful.
posted by null terminated at 9:19 PM on January 4, 2008

You could try this:

http://www.findlocalweather.com/how_far_is_it/mi/lansing.html
posted by JaredSeth at 9:21 PM on January 4, 2008

Should also add, I'd like it to be free. Also, I thought about Google earth and it wanted me to download something, etc. etc.
posted by Dr. Lurker at 9:21 PM on January 4, 2008

Google Earth is your pal here.

Check out this page for more info if needed.

One place you could have gone:

Ouagadougou
Capital of Burkina Faso
Population: 1068158
posted by B(oYo)BIES at 9:24 PM on January 4, 2008

Here's a map of all of the places in the world within 5300 miles of Detroit. 5300 miles is nearly a quarter of the way around the world, so the places within 5300 miles cover almost half the world.
posted by cameldrv at 9:28 PM on January 4, 2008 [3 favorites]

City Distance Calculator
posted by miss lynnster at 9:28 PM on January 4, 2008

Oooo... you could have traveled to Athens or Istanbul or Krasnoyarskiy or Khabarovskiy or Santiago or Cordoba or Rio de Janeiro...
posted by B(oYo)BIES at 9:35 PM on January 4, 2008

the organizers just cancelled the annual, long-standing road rally from europe (starting in lisbon this time) to dakar, senegal, reportedly about 5700 miles, due to terrorist threats attributed to al-qaeda. if it ever gets going again, it would be fun to do this rally in an armored humvee with a nice dog and a backseat full of rocket-propelled grenades to fit in the launcher (right up next to the driver in the front seat).
posted by bruce at 10:44 PM on January 4, 2008 [1 favorite]

Should also add, I'd like it to be free. Also, I thought about Google earth and it wanted me to download something, etc.

Um. It probably wanted you to download Google Earth, which is free. Trust us here, if you haven't played with Google Earth and are interested in visualizing where things are relative to where you are, etc. etc., then you should to get yourself a copy of Google Earth.
posted by mumkin at 1:36 AM on January 5, 2008

I'm probably nitpicking unnecessarily, but considering you are discussing driving across the surface of an oblate spheroid, there is no way to drive 5300 miles in a straight line on the surface, Any distance traveled on the surface would necessarily be a curve. In order to drive in a straight line, you would have to tunnel through the earth.
posted by namewithoutwords at 10:23 AM on January 5, 2008

Huh, anyone want to guess why I cannot get cameldrv's link to display anything in either FF or IE? I'm not blocking any scripts.
posted by maxwelton at 1:17 PM on January 5, 2008