to be on nodding terms with one's neighbours

Pittsburgh supercomputer is complete, and scientists are champing at the bit to use it.

She walked back and forth along the canal three times and wiped her eyes again. He was in P’ing-ting. P’ing-ting was more than two hours away. If she hurried, she could reach the place in two hours.

Back on the beach in the far-flung Southeast, Tony Route and I hauled our gear into a USDA Forest Service cabin set in a bench of hemlocks over a remote salt chuck (a sort of brackish lake, connected to the sea by a channel that floods […] ) […] .