Yes.
Until about 10 minutes ago, I thought Independence, Kansas, and Independence, Missouri, were adjacent to each other. You know, like Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri. Nope, they’re about 170 miles apart. The book Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder, the TV movie from 1974 (but not the later 1970s TV series) and the current Netflix miniseries are all set near Independence, Kansas, where the Ingalls family really settled (illegally) in 1869.
If you want to get a feel for that part of Virginia, read the excellent Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s set in Lee County, the westernmost county of the state, adjacent to Tennessee and Kentucky.
I had the same misconception about Vancouver, WA and Vancouver, BC.
I didn’t even know about Vancouver, WA, let alone where is existed.
“Nashoba Valley” is a large, not precisely defined area northwest of Boston. When I first came back to the area, I thought that the Nashoba Valley Ski Area and the Nashoba Valley Winery must be close together, but they’re nowhere near each other. They’re 20 minutes (and several exits on I-495) apart.
Ontario, Oregon, on the state’s eastern edge, about a third of the way down the state, is farther north than Toronto, Ontario. In fact, its latitude is about the same as the area Neil Young wrote about in Helpless, “There is a town in north Ontario …”
I used to mentally picture the map of Europe with the Mediterranean on top.
That’s because my Diplomacy map either had it that way or because I Iiked to play with the map that way (I don’t remember and since I was 9 years old the original map has long ago been lost).
My wife and I were listening to it, and I had to stop. It was too close to where I grew up to hear about so many bad things. We drove right through Lee County a few weeks ago going from Chicago to Bristol, VA.
I was an adult before I realized Ireland is an island.
This is kind of surprising, because as a kid I loved looking at maps, atlases, and globes. I guess I never looked closely at the British Isles.
Portland OR is about the same latitude as Ottawa and Montreal, well north of Toronto.
Ontario OR has some unusual properties. There’s a well-known puzzle about how a place in a West Coast state can have the same time as an East Coast state. Part of the puzzle is solved by knowing the fact that part of Oregon is in the Mountain Time Zone; Ontario is the largest city in that section of Oregon.
The other properties have to do with Ontario being a border town. It’s located at the point that I-84 crosses the OR-ID boundary, so it’s the closest point in Oregon to Boise. Things legal in Oregon but illegal in Idaho (cannabis and abortion) are available there in inordinate quantites for a town of only 11K people. The last time I googled, Ontario OR had no fewer than 14 pot shops.
About the time Roe v Wade was overturned, Planned Parenthood opened a clinic in Ontario, a town way too small to support a clinic just from local demand. Most PP clinics provide a lot of different services and abortion is only a small fraction of those services. The one in Ontario mostly just does abortions.
Well, it’s a really big island. Someone might refer to it as “the mainland”, in comparison to, say, the Aran Islands.
And while we’re at it on latitudes, Cork, Ireland, at the island’s southern tip, is at about the same latitude as Saskatoon, Sasketchewan.
Thanks for that. But I thought it was attached to the rest of the UK. I knew it was a separate country, but I didn’t know it was a separate chunk of land.
The “United Kingdom” includes the islands of Jersey and Guernsey (presumably named for dairy cows) which are about 4 times farther from England than they are from France (part of nearby France is more northerly, closer to England). They are not in the class of counties (like northern Ireland or Wales) but they are also closer to being part of England than most Commonwealth states.
Properly speaking, Jersey and Guernsey, as well as the Isle of Man off the west coast, are Crown Dependencies - self-governing possessions of the monarch - and are not legally part of the United Kingdom.
This Venn diagram might help
I’m not 100% certain you’re joking here, but if you are it’s reasonably amusing.
In reality, they’re named after types of jumper.
Even today, you can be King of Canada, King of the UK [of Great Britain and what not], and King in Jersey, but that does not mean that Canada is part of the UK.
For some reason, I always think Iowa is farther west than it actually is, and whenever I see it on a map of the U.S. I’m surprised how not very far west it is from me. Des Moines is less than a 9 hour drive from SE Michigan, where I live. Am I conflating Iowa and Idaho? Maybe.