My mother tells much the same from when we Australians were in Denver for five months in 1996 about walking a kilometre to school. Also mild astonishment at ideas like baking cakes not from a packet mix.

Mind you, there weren’t many who would walk to school like that in Australia, and the number has continued to dwindle. But there were some.

To be fair, there are an embarrassingly large number of places in the US where safely walking to a store a few hundred meters away would be very difficult at best.

Well, everybody rode their horse everywhere in the Wild West.

This happened to me in Germany. To be fair, I was walking 10km on a rural road with two suitcases and no sidewalk.