Amazingly, you seem to be offering an anecdote about your relatives in Germany as a proof for your claim about the travel habits of Americans. The real question here is, have those relatives of yours ever been more than 50 miles from where they were born? Irrespective of Paris, did that 50 miles take them into France (or any other country)?
Will you concede that simply because of the distances involved, traveling outside of the country is quite a different proposition from say, anywhere in Kansas or Nebraska, than it is from Germany?
As for the 8-hour yardstick: with assistance from Google Maps I quickly identified multiple western states where a driver can spend 8 or more hours on the road traveling from an origin near one border of the state to a destination at the far border, and never cross any state lines(1). The states do not include Alaska or Texas.
1- CA: San Diego to Yreka; WA: Vancouver to Colville; ID: Bonners Ferry to Preston; MT: Libby to Broadus
> --- On Sat, 7/18/09, Percival Myers <permaceaem at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> What does "travel widely" mean? Serious question, because: from many
>> places in western Europe it is possible to travel 50 miles from home,
>> see two or more countries, and be considered as a person who has
>> traveled; the number of Americans who've never traveled more than 50
>> miles from home is diminishingly small.
>>
>> Percy
>