How transportation changed our lives during the 20th Century

How transportation changed our lives during the 20th Century
Do you remember the last big travel you made? Do you remember how many kilometers separated you from the starting point to the ending point? Can you now imagine doing the same travel 100 years ago? Hum… let the imagination fly… and right now I can figure out your thought: if you have a smile you are thinking how beautiful and pleasant it would be… you are in vacancies mode:) If you have a serious face you are probably thinking how boring that could be and how transportation changed the last century and how that changed our lives!

I could snap here a bunch of data about speed and time, but there are things that sometimes impress you more than simple and hard data. For example, my father sometimes says that when he was young he took a day to go to Oporto, and right now we go there shopping and come back on the same day (not frequently, though). I’m now remembering a story with my father and my uncle. The two were going to the army on his motorcycle when they had an accident. This was in the morning. My father broke a leg (I don’t remember what happened to my uncle, but it wasn’t that bad) and needed to go to a hospital in Oporto. The trip was made on an ambulance and at the middle of the trip, and because they were in the middle of nowhere at 4 or 5 p.m., they had to stop, with my father’s broken leg, to eat ham and drink wine that my father had on the motorcycle. They arrived to Oporto at about 10 p.m. (my father says it was a really old ambulance :))…

Well, I hope this let you thinking about the past and the present transportation.

Evandro Alves
Upper-Intermediate