Driving up Interstate 15 recently, just north of Escondido, I saw on the distant horizon my destination and thought, "Dang, I still have one long way to go. Glad I brought my iPod!"

But my target was a mere 45 minutes away - with good traffic, anyway.
Traveling around our expansive country on vacation or business, whether by plane, train, or automobile obviously takes more time, from hours to days, and a lot more patience.

What if we could speed up these trips? What if we could go as fast as, say, the Space Shuttle? The Shuttle dashes over our heads at more than 17,000 miles an hour. That would allow us to cover the US in just over 10 minutes. That, my friends, is fast. At this great speed, it takes just about an hour and a half to go around this entire planet. Going that fast would cut travel time anywhere to nothing. Space travel to other places might be reasonable and fun! Or would it?

What about traveling to the nearest heavenly body, our Moon? How long would that take, going at a more realistic speed of about 25,000 miles an hour?

An imaginary straight trip to the Moon at that clip, not including slowing down for parking into lunar orbit, would take about 10 hours. Not too bad. That would be like a nice drive to northern California.

What about to Mars, our nearest neighbor? At a distance of about 50 million miles at close approach, you'd think it wouldn't take too long to get there, maybe a couple days, maybe a week. Well, if we could shoot an idealized straight-line journey to Mars with no stops or slowing down it would take - ahem - about 80 days.

How about the sun, that big ball in the sky, so close you can almost touch it? Try a little more than 5 months! And that is a mere 93 million miles - one astronomical unit (AU) in astrospeak.

The outer planets are way farther than the sun. For example, a straight-line trip in our imaginary Shuttle to Jupiter, that bright object in the western skies after sunset, with no potty stops, would take over two years.

The Kuiper Belt, you ask? To make it to that new hot spot for planet-searching, just beyond Pluto's orbit, our Shuttle would have to fly for over 20 years. Twenty years. Imagine taking off in 1986, when Ronald Reagan was president, and bee-lining yourself at 25,000 miles an hour directly out to the semi-congested area just beyond the main planets - and just now getting there.

And that isn't even the edge of the solar system!

Want to go to the nearest known star outside our system? Proxima Centauri is that star, and it's about 4.3 light years away, meaning it takes light that much time to get to it. But light travels at over 186,000 miles a second. Our vastly slower Shuttle would take - sit down - over 115,000 years to visit our "nearest neighbor."

Can you begin to conceive of the nearly inconceivable distances of space, and the nearly impossible idea of distant space travel?

Let's up our Shuttle speed to half the speed of light. In order to cross our Milky Way galaxy, our home of over 100 billion stars, even at our new incomprehensible speed it would take about a quarter of a million years!

To go to the nearest other major galaxy, Andromeda, visible in northeastern skies later tonight, would take our Super Speedy Shuttle more than 5 million years.

And this is just our local group of galaxy neighbors. The known visible universe extends out in all directions another 13.5 billion - that's billion with a "b" - light years in all directions!

I don't know about you, but once we get beyond the solar system any journey, even at breakneck speeds, escapes my tiny imagination.

Next time I see my destination off in the distance, just a dot on the horizon, I'll remind myself that it could be a lot worse. That may make a drive on the 15 a little more bearable. Maybe not.