Gareth, that's an excellent point on relative distances. Many of us who DON'T live in big cities (where one often has to drive for 2 hours to go 20 miles) regularly get in the car and go 100 miles or more for a weekend's camping. Of course, gas (petrol) is cheap here, although we think its expensive; about $1.25 US per gallon...and I won't even try to convert that to decimal pounds per liter.

The ignorance of some Americans about geography isn't limited to Wales. I live in New Mexico (Dead Horse, if you're looking at a map, that's west of the rounded part that points south, aka Texas). There is a story told about a New Mexican who tried to buy a ticket for a New York show by telephone, only to be told by someone {who didn't know the difference between a state and a country} that the ticket sellers couldn't sell outside of the US. Of course, many of us consider New York to be in another country [it is, after all, named after a city in England]...or perhaps on another planet.