looks like the world ends right at 120°W × 45°N
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Or, stay with me here, you have amnesia about the car ride but are currently living through a “back to the future” scenario.
Just to be safe you should probably abandon all your friends and loved ones and look for a wild-haired old man with a DeLorean.
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At the risk of bringing out the projection nerds with their obligatory xkcds, one could argue all global maps are terrible. Unless they have weird slices through things to flatten them out, then they necessarily hugely distort certain landmasses– generally whichever ones Americans and Europeans don’t care about. As a northern Canadian, I don’t believe I have ever seen a map that doesn’t show my home as a distorted mess.
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I mean, anyone can miss Canada, all tucked away down there.
But, as a Canadian, this is so accurate. There is no way of telling the true scale of this country from a map. You gotta be three days into your drive across Ontario before it really sinks in.
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Or God’s pool table, Saskatchewan. Or BC, where the twisty highways make every little town an eight hour drive to the next one.
My American friends come to visit and are shocked at how everything that would be three hours away in the US is 7 hours away here. I try to explain how dramatically larger Canada is, but they don’t get it until hour four or five of cows.
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Yeah. This one took me a long time to wrap my head around. “Oh good. This place is only 250 km away. We’ll be there in no time.” …7 hours later, “Are we ever going to get there?” 
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Driving in Ireland is the same way.
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There’s a common refrain for that in Maine, best delivered with a strong Maine accent, “you can’t get theyuh from heeyuh.”
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I need a Fish Map that as all of the Monsters that Fish know.
A map that instead of Here be Dragons has the Monsters labeled as Fish know them.
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I’m confused about this, though, in the context of bad projections: doesn’t the standard Mercator make Canada look larger than it actually is, compared with countries like USA closer to the equator?
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It does. In fact Canada is basically the same area as the US – a bit more counting the lakes, a bit less without – though that’s only because of Alaska, which is big.
Even so most people in Canada live relatively close to the border, which is exactly as long on the US side. So if it’s much easier to drive across one than the other, it’s not simply because of size.
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Canada is about 2% larger, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it really is.
The Mercator projection does make Canada look bigger than it is, but that’s separate from why Americans don’t realize Canada is big. It’s because Americans tend to think their country is the biggest one and all other ones are small. That’s the Simpsons joke referenced above. Americans think all other countries are “little European ones not worth thinking about”. It’s a peculiar manifestation of American exceptionalism.
As someone who has spent much of her life driving across both countries, I can tell you that is not true. Canada is noticeably bigger and you feel it in the hours.
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Hmm. Seattle to Augusta: 5147 km per google maps
Trans-Canada main route: 7476 km
…but 1478 km of that is Halifax to St. John’s. I wasn’t sure I should count that, you’re already on the east coast and I assumed it’s not what people think of as driving across the country. I mean, I’m not throwing in Alaska either.
With that it’s about 45% farther but without that it’s 17% farther. Which is noticeable, but still a lot less than double, was my main thought.
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I spent half my childhood in Michigan and had no idea there was a town named “Dick”. We all knew about Hell, but had no idea that existed.
I have been to Spread Eagle, WI, and don’t be shocked, but there’s a gentleman’s club there.
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I have this one at my office wall. I work with GIS. As do about a third of the people on the same floor.
And not one of them actually took notice, i.e. had a closer look. Not a single person.
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Not sure how to get them to translate a Carta Marina…
ETA: @BakaNeko - Wait, no Zork? (only terrible in the sense that is the last resort for the hopelessly lost…)
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