Being pedantic, the UK and parts of Eastern Europe are already full members of the EU, but not the Schengen Agreement which allows free movement between the member countries without passports. There are also members of the Schengen Agreement who aren't members of the EU - Norway and Switzerland are two.

That said, most people's first use of a passport will be to visit France to pick up beer, or a holiday to Spain.

Bruno, is this the image you are referring to?
http://home.arcor.de/xelnaga/america-sees-world.jpg

No that can't be the right one, the US isn't quite in the middle and is far too small

Cheers

Cris.

As is Canada. I've made numerous passport-free, multi-thousand mile road trips, in two different countries that each span a land mass larger than the entirety of western Europe. (33 states and 6 provinces -- I'm missing the far-north, the deep south, pieces of the eastern seaboard, and Hawaii.)

Country-count isn't a particularly great metric for how widely traveled you are, unless you live in an area of the world where it seems you can fit a dozen countries on the head of a pin.

OK, just because some of us live in places where taking the wrong turn on the motorway finds us in germany or belgium....

I think working in the IT industry makes one very cosmopolitan, or at least Americapolitan. I've visited about as many distinct cultures in the US (Bay Area/Austin, North-West, Philly/NY, New Orleans, Hawaii) as I have in continental Europe (Paris France, rural France, Netherlands, Italy, Spain), despite one being much closer-by than the other.

Peter

I agree, but the flip side of this coin is that while Canada and the US are far larger than Western Europe, there are far fewer distinct cultures.

That may be true. I have been to quite a few states but not close to all of them. I have never been to the black hills (Mount Rushmore) even though Minnesota boarders South Dakota. I am going there this summer though.

I didn't travel much as a kid due to my dad not wanting to go anywhere and being afraid to fly so now as an adult I just don't think about it. If I have extra money I would buy a new TV over taking a trip. That has changed after getting married because my wife has traveled a lot and wants to do more.

I live in northern Virginia, and the people 20 miles south of here consider themselves a different state. I guess it's how you define "culture"

But to be serious, the question at hand is how many places one has been, not cultures - which don't require passports - participated in.

I think that focussing on that particular distiction is perhaps somewhat (but not quite) unique to one particular locale..

Here's a comparison. http://goeurope.about.com/od/europeanmaps/l/bl-country-size-comparison-map.htm

One of my service men just got on the DHS's watchlist because he went to Mexico three times in one week and then went to Canada. They yanked his passport and won't give it back. We are getting seriously weird here....

Glad I don't live in the "land of the free" [sic].

Consider: New Orleans and Brooklyn are probably about as far apart culturally as exists in America, and they still share the same language, albeit significantly different accents, same pop culture, etc. The same distance in Europe takes you from Barcelona to Copenhagen, or London to Belgrade, or, uh, Milan to Minsk.

And San Diego to Boston is about the same distance as Lisbon to the northern tip of Norway, or London to Baghdad.

Hahaha - happened to me once. Was driving from Munich to visit Amsterdam for the weekend and found myself partying in Prague for 4 days. Excellent mistake to make.

(Oh, and didn't mean to come across all "I'm such a traveller, me", and I wasn't meaning to impugne the US. It was just very surprising to me, considering the direct connections from major US hubs to just about everywhere should make it easy to travel.)

Only if you live in one of the hub cities. Otherwise everywhere is twice as far away as it should be. Time wise and distance wise both. But mostly time wise.

Edit: It doesn't matter if I leave from Sacramento, Oakland or SF. Everywhere I've gone recently has taken two flights. The US air system suffers from an over abundance of "You can't get there from here!"

For what it's worth, my first trip abroad was to Mexico, while I was in college. No passport required at the time. My next trip abroad was to England while I was in graduate school. I was originally planning to go to California (from New Jersey), but found it cheaper to fly to London, and I had some friends there I wanted to see. This was my first ever requirement to have a passport.

(Annoyance: at the time I got my original passport, I had long hair and a goatee. I nuked all that a few years later, but passport photos last ten years. This made some airport immigration officers look at me funny, particularly in Canada. There's something about Canadian immigration. No other country seems to care that much about who shows up.)

Yeah, but there's one major difference:

In the same distance (and airfare) as you can get to dozens of cities with thousand year histories very different from your own and each other, I can only get to a handful of cities with histories longer than 250 years, most of which are really fairly similar to my own. That doesn't mean that New York, Washington, Boston, Atlanta, Charleston, etc. aren't interesting cities to visit, it just means that they're not as distinctly different; there's almost no draw to experience the culture: you pretty much have to want to go there for some specific reason.

That's why I usually fly Southwest. They don't use a hub and spoke system, but rather a point-to-point system. This results in a LOT more direct flights. Also, lucky for me, Phoenix is good airport for flying Southwest.

I use to absolutely despise Southwest. That whole cattle seating thing drove me crazy. Then, sometime in the last 10 years (maybe with the online check-in?), they started doing something right. It is now easier and less painful to fly SWA than any other airline. If I have a choice, I will fly SWA over any other airline unless I am going international.

And, if you don't live in one of those hub cities, the cost jumps up a couple hundred dollars per ticket, too. When people ask me if I miss living in Los Angeles, I tell them no, with two exceptions -- the friends I made there, and LAX.