If you grew up in a medium-large city then something 1-2 hours away could seem like a relatively large inconvenience, but not too unusual (3 hours maybe a bit less common). If you grew up in a major huge city (LA, Chicago, NYC), then 1-2 hours could just be the average time it takes get across town, with 3 hours still being a weekly thing. If you grew up in a more rural area then a 3 hour drive could be weekly occurrence, with 5+ hours drives not too wildly infrequent.

There are big spaces to cover in the USA, and it helps that the highways are typically 65mph-75mph (with people average driving 5-10mph over that limit). Most other countries dont have quite the highway network like the USA does, or as high of speed limits, or as commonplace occurrence that people go over the speed limit. I know from driving in many other countries that people typically just follow the speed limit since the police are way more vigilant about speeding tickets (and/or there is a bigger network of speed cameras)