Confusing place names?

There was an incident caused by that a few months ago. A woman wanted to get to Vancouver WA but followed the road signs to Vancouver BC. When she tried to cross the border, they found a grenade in her glove box. I think it turned out to be filled with sand, but it looked real, and that’s all the customs agents would care about. At any rate, they had to shut down the whole (rather busy) border crossing for a while.

Posted by Dewey Finn

That happened to a colleague’s mother who was coming from Italy to visit him in DC, but bought tickets to Dallas Texas. They were talking on cell phones to each other, “I’m standing in front of baggage carousel 2,” and “So am I, where are you?” for hours

[hijack] You’ve obviously forgotten or never heard Lohman and Barkley on KFI Los Angeles with Ted J. Baloney, president of Baloney Airlines with daily 747 service from Brawley to El Centro.[/hijack]

Oh, the suburbs of Chicago are confusing as hell. Early 20th-century developers were afflicted with a severe lack of imagination.

You have Chicago Heights and Chicago Ridge. Park Ridge, Park Forest and Forest Park. Northbrook, Northfield, Northlake. Oak Forest, Oak Lawn and Oak Park (not to mention Lake Forest and River Forest). River Grove, Riverdale and Riverside. Palos Heights, Palos Hills, Palos Park. Glencoe, Glenview and Glenwood. It’s surprising anyone who didn’t grow up in Cook County can find their way around.

Today’s Melbourne Age reports the transport company booked to ferry Elvira, Mistress of the Dark’s tour around Melbourne got cancelled because it turned out her agents meant Melbourne, Florida.

Ms Macphisto: I live about four miles from the Peace Arch crossing. It’s a mystery to me how someone could *not * notice that they’re driving north, when their destination is south. You’d think that driving through Seattle might have given her a clue. (For those who don’t know, Vancouver, WA is in the southern part of the state across from Portland, OR. It’s 125 miles from Ft Lewis to Vancouver, WA. Vancouver BC is about 300 miles north of Vancouver, WA.)

Hey, i’ve seen that one! My brothers and I were so excited, because we thought they’d show them walking around Auckland, which would have been exciting.

Um, exciting if you live in Auckland. Which, as it so happens, I do.

I’ve heard there’s a Hamilton in Canada, which is meant to be a bit of a hole (this is from an interview in a music mag a while ago). There’s a Hamilton in NZ too and it’s a hole as well.

(Unless you live there. Then I’m sure it’s lovely)

Between Indianapolis and Greenfield IN, on US40, there’s a nondescript bridge you cross over a typical midwestern stream of water. The name of the body of water: “Nameless Creek”

AH, but I have the original Hamilton!:slight_smile:

wrt New Zealand, I once had a confusing chat with a woman who mentioned Dunedin in (I think) Florida. She had never heard of the New Zealand one. and I had never heard of the U.S. one. (Of course, once again, Celyn pretty much gets to have the original one - all these blooming colonial name-thiefs!) :slight_smile:

When I was a TA I had a very confusing conversation with a student from China. I was talking about Cheyenne, Wyoming(only 100 miles away), and he was talking about Xi’an, China(about 99 billion miles away, I mean was it really that bad of an assumption) which we each pronounced pretty much the same. It only took a couple minutes to finally figure it out, but we both thought the other one was totally nuts at first. :slight_smile:

There is a Primghar, Iowa that claims to be the “World’s Only Primghar.” This interesting tidbit is offered on a sign at the edge of town. When you drive through it is followed shortly thereafter by a similar sign at the other edge of town.

I was delayed on a flight to San Jose CA while a woman who was supposed to go to San Jose, Costa Rica got off the plane.

Dunedin, Florida is a lovely place, it’s just a bit north of me. And they have Highland Games once a year! Some of us don’t have the benefit of living in Scotland and we must make do the best we can.

There are at least two Sydneys in Canada, one in Nova Scotia and one 6000 km away in BC. Of course, the one in BC is spelt “Sidney”, but if you aren’t sure what continent you are going to, spelling may not matter.

manx, the Hamilton in Canada is a rust-belt steel town at the west end of Lake Ontario. Nice early-twentieth-century buildings downtown though.

Except that you can take the boat to Toronto. :slight_smile:

A while back, the Toronto Star, the largest English-language newspaper in Toronto, Ontario, did an article about another Toronto (in Ohio I think). Slammed the poor place as a backwater where people get drunk or get out. I felt really bad about it. Good thing they didn’t know about Toronto, Australia.

This is especially confusing when a US database is programmed to show only a state code on postal addresses… but also handles addresses to Canada. Whose country code is CA. There’s a reason post-office rules have the country name spelled out in full for the postal workers in the originating country.

There are 4 Hamiltons in Australia, which makes it the most common place name in that country. I lived for about 20 years in Hamilton, NSW (a suburb of Newcastle), and I’ve visited Hamilton, QLD (a suburb of Brisbane) and Hamilton, TAS (a very pretty small town. I have yet to visit Hamilton, VIC, but I have driven through Hamilton, ON, a couple of times: it’s very impressive, since it’s much larger than any of the Australian Hamiltons.

I don’t want to get off track too much, but all the Hamilton talk brought to mind Hamilton, Ohio. Supposedly it officially added an exclamation point to its name (“Hamilton!”) at one point in order to try to improve its image.

Aaaaaanyway… in the same region: The Dayton Daily News has a habit of not including the word “County” or even “Co.” after a county name in headlines, so whenever I see reference to something happening in “Warren” in the local/state section, I have to remind myself that they are referring to the county to our south and not to the city of Warren, Ohio, which is at the complete other end of the state. Similarly slight confusion is possible with Miami County.

Luckily for the clueless, Sidney BC is a suburb of Victoria, so the only airport in (or next to, I’m a little vague on the exact municipal boundaries) Sidney is the Victoria airport.

Johnny L.A. - Yeah, the whole driving to the wrong Vancouver incident was pretty mind-boggling. I seem to recall hearing that she didn’t even clue in when she hit the border. You’d think that even if it didn’t start to dawn on her that something was wrong after she went through Seattle the line-up and Canadian flags might have been a hint. Just one question for you that occurred to me though, since I haven’t been to your side of the border in ages. When you’re heading north on I-5 within Washington state, do the signs say Vancouver BC or just Vancouver? I know that signs in BC heading south on 99 just say Seattle, but as far as I know there isn’t a Seattle BC tucked away somewhere up north or anything like that.

I haven’t noticed. I did see one sign though, that said something like “Last exit before border”.

I’m reminded of a time I drove to Massachussets for an interview. Unfortunately, I went there with exactly enough money to pay the tolls and get 10 bucks of gas. On the way back, I made a wrong turn and started heading east bound instead of westbound - on the toll portion of the highway. The woman at the tollbooth had no interest in my mistake, and charged me a dollar to go eastbound. Now I’m penniless, so I can’t go back across the highway in the right direction. So I had to drive through Rhode Island.

Now, I’d never driven in Rhode Island before, so I was not entirely sure what I was doing, but I just followed signs and headed generally south (until I found a place I could cut back west into a familiar part of CT.) As I’m driving I see an overhead sign that says something like:

Main St. Exit 3
Dent Ave. Exit 3a
Hartford Ct. Exit 4

So I’m sitting there trying to figure out whether Hartford Ct. meant Hartford Court, or Hartford Connecticut. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a highway sign where the state code wasn’t capitalized (CT), so I’m trying to figure out where I am in relation to Connecticut and whether it’s likely that exit 4 would lead me to Hartford. All this of course, while I’m driving in rush hour traffic, and my gas meter is getting alarmingly low (I’ve gone very much out of my way at this point). Finally, I decide to take the chance (it seems to bear out, geographically) and take exit 4.

Luckily, the sign did indeed mean “Hartford CT” but why on earth they had it as “Hartford Ct.” is beyond me. Confusing, to say the least.

(For any RI nit-pickers out there, I’ve completely made up the street names and exit numbers; I can only remember the Hartford Ct. bit)