I've never spent considerable time around the lakes, but I do have a Great Lakes experience that I think back to often. Right after college, I was floating in

I've never spent considerable time around the lakes, but I do have a Great Lakes experience that I think back to often. Right after college, I was floating in life a bit pre-grad school, and I took a trip from home (Pennsylvania) out to Vegas, to drive with my cousin who was getting stationed in Virginia, and didn't want to make the drive alone. I connected through O'hare, and when flying into Chicago, being on the right side of the plane I got a great view of the bottom of Lake Michigan from the air. As we cruised along the southern coast making our approach, that distance between the two sides of the lake with Chicago on the East really stuck in my head, and I realized I now have a measurable mental image of a chunk of the earth's surface, that is large enough to be on a globe, but small enough to take in, and relate to things at human scale, like boats, or the buildings of Chicago. I use that reference pretty often when looking at maps/globes and trying to get a handle of sizes and distances, like "Oh, that's just three Lake Michigans' wide".