You do realise when you say stuff like this that Europe, by the conventional understanding of it extending to the Ural Mountains, is still bigger than the US by around 300.000 square kilometres right? Europeans do know how big it is.

„But tourists…“ people don’t have the capacity to comprehend scale in unfamiliar environments. The New Zealand subreddit gets all sorts of nationalities asking if they can do crazy shit like drive from Auckland to Queenstown in a day.

We do understand that, don’t you worry.

Lisbon to Helsinki takes 47 hours of driving btw.

And you haven't even reached far North yet, there's still 1000+ km of Finland remaining.

Most people dont have to drive from new york to los angeles or similar, thats 42 hours, but we have similar distances in europe as well. The longest ive driven was about 30 hours(dont even ask, thats too much even for me) but a friend of mine and their family had to drive down from åre to barcelona which google maps says is 37 hours. I think it took four days for them. Also from where i am right now, kiruna, a very northern city in sweden, is 18 hours away. The lomgest drive in sweden wothout going through another country is 22 hours so the us being larger isnt a very valid argument. If you look at the entirity of europe its larger than the us and the distances are longer but what actually matters is the population density. When comparing the contiguous us and the eu for example the population density is double in the eu while the whole of europe has a population density about 50% higher than the us.

Europeans think 200km is a long distance. Americans think 200 years is a long time. /jk