Resets after each turn <| sep |> American here who ' s spent time in Europe UK , Switzerland , Austria , Italy , Germany , Netherlands . It may put it in perspective that the size of the U . S . , and how geographically spread out were are , isn ' t really understood by most Europeans . The entire of England and Scotland is about the same size as California . I ' m celebrating Thanksgiving with my family in Oregon , my native home state , but I live in California ' s Silicon Valley now . We drove here that ' s a trip of over 600 miles ~ 1000 km each way , about 11 hours on the Interstate with some rest stops along the way . The trip is about 13 longer than a drive from London to Edinburgh 400 miles , about the same as driving from Paris to Prague . In that drive , we only crossed two U . S . states California and Oregon . We have 46 more contiguous states , although in fairness the Eastern states are quite a bit smaller than those in the West . It takes about 5 full days of driving to traverse the United States from ocean to ocean East to West , with minimal stopping . I studied German in high school and University , this was back in the early 1980 ' s before German reunification . Our instructors at the time tried to give us a sense of size by saying the the former West Germany Federal Republic of Germany was about the same land area as our single state of Oregon , which is by no means one of the truly large U . S . states like Alaska or Texas or California . At that time , there were only about 1 . 5 million people living in Oregon , but about 60 million West Germans .