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The One Minute Geographer: A Long Tennessee Drive
The One Minute Geographer is going to take a break from Massachusetts and other states for a while to look at some fun stuff in geography.
It’s a long drive from the southeastern-most corner of Memphis to the northeastern corner of Tennessee near the Virginia-North Carolina border. I picked the small town of Laurel Bloomery to illustrate on the map above. According to Google maps, that’s 545 miles and it will take you about 8 hours and 10 minutes.
I saw a video on TikTok the other day where a young man spoke about the length of the state of Tennessee, saying that the northeastern tip of the state was closer to Canada than it was to Memphis in the southwestern tip of the state. Then he went on to say that the southwestern tip was, in turn, closer to Mexico than it was to the northeastern tip.
Well, he got the first part right, but not the second part. You can see on the map above that, as the crow flies, that northeastern tip is closer to Ontario, Canada than it is to Memphis. (In driving distance, it’s not quite true because you have to go to Detroit and then drop back down into Windsor, but it’s only a few miles longer.)
