Perspective

I just did something I have always been curious to do - compare our city with the Twin Cities metro area. It's always seemed to me to be about the same size, and it is! There is a loop running around our city that is approximately the same length as the 494/694 loop, the former being 98 km and the latter being 119 km. East to west the areas are the same distance (around 15 miles). North-south the Twin Cities exceeds ours by about 6 miles, but we've got them in population. The metro area has 3.5 million people. We've got almost 20 million.

This was brought to mind for me a few weeks ago when I was explaining my home town to a masseuse. He hadn't heard of Minnesota, and I told him that was because it wasn't a very populous state. When I said my hometown has about 100,000 people and is one of the larger cities in my state, he laughed. The area of town where we live has 600,000 people! Yep, just the area of town.

No wonder it's crowded.