The USA is huge. IDK what country you’re from, but I’ll use France as a point of comparison because it’s large and the capital isn’t really in the center.

Bayonne->Paris is about the farthest you can be from the capital while still living in mainland France. That’s 770 km.

This is shorter than the distance from Washington DC->Atlanta, which is in one of the original 13 colonies. It’s pretty close to the distance from DC->Indianapolis, but that’s still within the 1776 USA borders (albeit, an unorganized territory of the 13 colonies).

Add in the Louisiana purchase and various conquests westward, and a Californian visiting DC can be like visiting Paris from Kuwait.

It’s reasonably common for USians to visit their state capital, but visiting DC is definitely an upper-middle class vacation unless you happen to live in a nearby state already.