Why do so few Americans travel abroad?”
When you go to Europe, it takes an entire day to get there and an entire day to get back (including getting to the airport, security, customs, dealing with jet lag, etc.) Unless you’re planning to be there a minimum of a week, it’s really not worth the trouble. By contrast, it’s not entirely unreasonable to go from Paris to London for lunch. OK, that’s exaggerating, but I heard an awful lot of French accents in Harrod’s in December from Parisians doing their Christmas shopping. But that doesn’t explain why more Britons have been to American than the reverse. If anything, Britain has a lot of advantages: being smaller, you can see a lot more of it. And being older, there’s more to see in any one place. I’ve heard more than one European tourist complain about how far it is between San Francisco and the Grand Canyon with very little of interest in between. Part of it, I suspect, is that the Europeans have a culture of traveling between countries. A passport isn’t mandatory, but there is e
