Technically it's the middle of the Afsluitdijk
February 16, 2017 1:20 PM Subscribe
Rarely is the question asked: what point in the Netherlands is the furthest away from any buildings and how far away can you get from people?
I would be curious to see this for other regions! I might just tinker with the resources at the end of the post for a bit.
posted by LSK at 1:40 PM on February 16, 2017
posted by LSK at 1:40 PM on February 16, 2017
Yeah okay the question is cool but tell me more about this travel stack exchange thing in general?...
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:54 PM on February 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:54 PM on February 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
Oh man I love this! Such a great use of OpenStreetMap (there's an ongoing debate in the OSM community about large data imports, I am totally bookmarking this for the future).
posted by everybody had matching towels at 2:01 PM on February 16, 2017
posted by everybody had matching towels at 2:01 PM on February 16, 2017
Oddly enough I was reading something else today which embedded a cool map with the title "Holland is not a dense country but an empty city".
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:56 PM on February 16, 2017 [5 favorites]
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:56 PM on February 16, 2017 [5 favorites]
Based on the quantity of jokes I'd say Drenthe, which I always visualize as an endless, empty, dreary swamp.
posted by 1adam12 at 3:34 PM on February 16, 2017
posted by 1adam12 at 3:34 PM on February 16, 2017
I think they are wrong, I bet it is the top of Washington Slagbaii National Park in Bonaire. There are a couple buildings at the bottom of the park and by Goto Meer, but the top of the park should still be about 5km from any buildings. Semi-related trivia: the two tallest mountains in the Netherlands are both in the Caribbean as well: Mt. Scenery in Saba and The Quill in Statia.
posted by snofoam at 4:38 PM on February 16, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by snofoam at 4:38 PM on February 16, 2017 [3 favorites]
Just to expand on the cool map i_am_joe's_spleen marked above, here is a bit more detail on the holland map
posted by defcom1 at 5:01 PM on February 16, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by defcom1 at 5:01 PM on February 16, 2017 [3 favorites]
GuyZero: "Geez, 2 km? That's as far as you can get? You may be better off buying a plane ticket to Canada."
There is a city park here where you could get farther away than that. The buildingless zone wouldn't be wholly within the park (about half of it would be Crown land) but you could stand within city limits and be more than 2 kilometres from a building.
posted by Mitheral at 5:20 PM on February 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
There is a city park here where you could get farther away than that. The buildingless zone wouldn't be wholly within the park (about half of it would be Crown land) but you could stand within city limits and be more than 2 kilometres from a building.
posted by Mitheral at 5:20 PM on February 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
Yeah okay the question is cool but tell me more about this travel stack exchange thing in general?...
I'm fairly active over there. It has some really good and knowledgeable people, and it's a good resource for getting answers to travel questions, but it also suffers from the Stack Exchange rules-lawyering problem of people who would rather find reasons to close questions rather than see them get answered, hostility toward anybody who hasn't asked a perfect question or understood a bunch of complicated unwritten rules, and an insistence on avoiding questions that could involve the slightest matter of opinion. It also gets a ton of visa and immigration related questions that might not be the most interesting.
As an example, a new user who shows up to ask "what is the best way to get from City X to City Y?" will likely find that their question has been closed as opinion-based, because apparently they were somehow supposed to know that they had to ask "what is the fastest way" or "what is the cheapest way" for their question to be acceptable.
All that said, it's a good resource if you have questions that fit in well with the site, and browsing the most upvoted questions will give you some good stuff to read.
posted by zachlipton at 6:11 PM on February 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
I'm fairly active over there. It has some really good and knowledgeable people, and it's a good resource for getting answers to travel questions, but it also suffers from the Stack Exchange rules-lawyering problem of people who would rather find reasons to close questions rather than see them get answered, hostility toward anybody who hasn't asked a perfect question or understood a bunch of complicated unwritten rules, and an insistence on avoiding questions that could involve the slightest matter of opinion. It also gets a ton of visa and immigration related questions that might not be the most interesting.
As an example, a new user who shows up to ask "what is the best way to get from City X to City Y?" will likely find that their question has been closed as opinion-based, because apparently they were somehow supposed to know that they had to ask "what is the fastest way" or "what is the cheapest way" for their question to be acceptable.
All that said, it's a good resource if you have questions that fit in well with the site, and browsing the most upvoted questions will give you some good stuff to read.
posted by zachlipton at 6:11 PM on February 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
Along the Oostvaardersdijk, next to the Oostvaardersplassen you can get as far as 3km away from any buildings. If you want to exclude that for the same reasons as we excluded the Afsluitdijk and the Houtribdijk, you could go the other side of the "plassen" and still be well over 2.5km away from any buildings.
My thought, growing up in the Pilbara area of Western Australia, is "3km from a building? How quaint!"
posted by Talez at 6:14 PM on February 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
My thought, growing up in the Pilbara area of Western Australia, is "3km from a building? How quaint!"
posted by Talez at 6:14 PM on February 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
Because I am a Bostonian and so naturally try to connect everything to Boston, here is a map showing the point in Boston that is further from a Dunkin' Donuts than any other point (as long as you leave out the outer harbor islands, that is).
posted by adamg at 7:27 PM on February 16, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by adamg at 7:27 PM on February 16, 2017 [4 favorites]
How ... how do you do your primal screaming?
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:12 PM on February 16, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:12 PM on February 16, 2017 [4 favorites]
There is a city park here where you could get farther away than that. The buildingless zone wouldn't be wholly within the park (about half of it would be Crown land) but you could stand within city limits and be more than 2 kilometres from a building.
I was thinking the same thing, living in Boulder, CO, USA. There's multiple places in the OSMP where you'd be > 2km from any paved road, house, etc. Not bad for a town of 100,000.
posted by alex_skazat at 9:33 PM on February 16, 2017
I was thinking the same thing, living in Boulder, CO, USA. There's multiple places in the OSMP where you'd be > 2km from any paved road, house, etc. Not bad for a town of 100,000.
posted by alex_skazat at 9:33 PM on February 16, 2017
How ... how do you do your primal screaming?
You go on a spiritual journey to Finland of course.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:18 PM on February 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
You go on a spiritual journey to Finland of course.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:18 PM on February 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
How ... how do you do your primal screaming?
Also popular is buying a remote farm in Norway and moving there. Seriously, we have a ton of Dutch people moving to our rural areas.
posted by Harald74 at 12:05 AM on February 17, 2017 [2 favorites]
Also popular is buying a remote farm in Norway and moving there. Seriously, we have a ton of Dutch people moving to our rural areas.
posted by Harald74 at 12:05 AM on February 17, 2017 [2 favorites]
Not literally the MIDDLE of the Afsluitdijk, even. There's a restaurant there. Buildings everywhere!!
I grew up in Holland and spent a long time in Canada after that. I remember Canadians asking where Dutch people went if they wanted to get away from other people. YOU CAN'T. They're everywhere. In fact, once you start going to the places on this map that are the furthest from buildings (Afsluitdijk, Veluwe) there will be lots of people there as well, all collectively enjoying the vast expanse of land/water without buildings.
posted by easternblot at 1:58 AM on February 17, 2017 [5 favorites]
I grew up in Holland and spent a long time in Canada after that. I remember Canadians asking where Dutch people went if they wanted to get away from other people. YOU CAN'T. They're everywhere. In fact, once you start going to the places on this map that are the furthest from buildings (Afsluitdijk, Veluwe) there will be lots of people there as well, all collectively enjoying the vast expanse of land/water without buildings.
posted by easternblot at 1:58 AM on February 17, 2017 [5 favorites]
How ... how do you do your primal screaming?
That's a solved problem.
posted by effbot at 5:29 AM on February 17, 2017
That's a solved problem.
posted by effbot at 5:29 AM on February 17, 2017
I always find it amusing how European friends, even Scandinavians, get a little freaked out at the wide-open spaces in the western US and Canada.
posted by Ber at 11:03 AM on February 17, 2017
posted by Ber at 11:03 AM on February 17, 2017
Sweden, Norway , Finland and Island are basically empty lands. Their governments spend a lot on trying to populate every corner. I can't imagine people from those countries freak out at anything wide-open. Danes are somehow unaware that Denmark is kind of empty too, so they might be the freaking out people.
posted by mumimor at 2:02 PM on February 18, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by mumimor at 2:02 PM on February 18, 2017 [1 favorite]
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posted by GuyZero at 1:35 PM on February 16, 2017 [4 favorites]