How Far Is It From Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters to Metro College?

Ok, time for a little break for me to go into a bit of a deeper dive into something so incredibly stupid and unnecessary, but I took the time to figure this out myself, so now I have to inflict it on all of you. How far is it from Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters to Metro College?

In our latest issue, Uncanny X-Men #24, Jean Grey is leaving Xavier's school to go to college at Metro. Upon learning this, Jean and Scott straight up angst out of their goddamn minds. Seriously, it is like they will never see each other ever again.

But they clearly just dropped her off by car. It can't be that far right? But hey, maybe it was a longer drive than depicted. Maybe they drove all day and this is some serious distance. So in the middle of reading, I put my tablet down to do some investigation.

First of all, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters is in the fictional Salem Center, New York, which is supposed to be in Westchester County. As there is no Salem Center, we can't get an exact location, but from various places I've looked, the best guess is it is in North Salem. As this is a pretty logical guess, I'm going to go with that.

Next, we have to locate Metro College. It's mentioned as where the Human Torch goes to college, so I assumed it had to be in or near New York, as he can't Fantastic any Fours if he isn't near the Baxter Building with the rest of the team. A quick google tells me that the fictional college is in New Jersey.

Ok New Jersey is too large an area to figure out how far of a drive this is. Human Torch could fly, so who knows how fast he could get from say, Cape May to Manhattan. It could be anywhere in the state. So I had to do some more digging. I looked up every appearance of Metro College in comics and in it's first appearance in Fantastic Four #50 I found this gem:

That gives a much more exact location, though not EXACT EXACT. Just across the river from Manhattan. That puts it somewhere between say Edgewater and Jersey City. Let's say Jersey City for worst case scenario.

Google Maps puts a drive between North Salem, New York and Jersey City, New Jersey at somewhere around an hour and 20 minutes.

"But Mr. X-Istentialist," I hear you ask, "What about in the 1960s when this was written, could it have been a longer drive then?" Well first of all, Mr. X-Istentialist was my father. But also, I'd thought of that as well.

I looked at old maps and found that one of the routes primarily used I-684, which hadn't even been started until 1968. BUT, one of the alternate routes that took about the same amount of time used Saw Mill River Parkway for the majority of the drive. I opened a map of Westchester County form 1950 and jackpot:

There it is. I will admit that there is still a little bit of a few places that were on roads that don't exist yet, but nothing major. A few miles here and there. At most it would be like a 2 hour drive. Hardly anything worth pretending like it is the end of everything. (Especially considering the girls that Hank and Bobby are currently dating live in Manhattan, which is right next door).

Happy with discovering that I was correct that they were overreacting, I decided to pick the comic back up again and finish reading it. And lo and behold...

Are you kidding me. You are not even 10 pages from angsting like you would never see each other again and you literally just show up for the weekend?! What was the point?! Why did I go through the trouble of learning all of this?! What were you going to do after you travelled 2 hours if they said you couldn't come in?!

Why do I do this to myself?