Tag: Texas
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Bostonian Confusion and I Don’t Mean Massachusetts
I kept things vague when I discussed Boston — the Boston in Texas — in Named Like a Whole Other Country. I stopped at “the man who opened the first store in the area was W. J. Boston.” Otherwise I might have tipped my hand that I’d discovered three Texas Bostons all within about four…
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Odds and Ends 10
I have an abundance of half-formed story ideas, an overflowing mailbag and a cornucopia of reader suggestions. That means it must be time once again for Odds and Ends, my recurring series of features and topics not quite large enough to fill an entire article on their own. A couple of interesting items came to…
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Named Like a Whole Other Country
What if I said that I could drive from Atlanta to Detroit, or Cleveland to Santa Fe, or Miami to Memphis in an hour and a half? So how about driving from Jacksonville to Buffalo in an hour? No, I didn’t say fly, I said drive. My apologies in advance to the international audience that…
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Certainly Not Austin
Austin is the vibrant capital city of Texas with nearly two million people in its greater metropolitan area. It features a bustling economy and a thriving music scene. Austinville in Virginia, well, it doesn’t have any of that. It’s a nondescript, unincorporated Appalachian village with only 2,500 residence in its entire zip code. Yet, as…
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Goin’ Down to Garland
I stumbled upon an old thread on the Straight Dope message boards discussing the naming of streets. Responsible parties included the usual cast of characters such as developers, county governments, planning commissions, city councils, working-level bureaucrats, and the like. One contributor on that message board mentioned that: “Several years ago, I was working with a…
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Yankee Doodle Dunce
My recent long weekend at the in-laws provided plenty of downtime, which is a good thing. However, I’m also one of those people who has to do something at all times. Luckily they always have a stack of magazines — remember those quaint periodic booklets printed on actual paper? And I had plenty of time…
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He Went Thata Way
One little neighborhood in Las Vegas, Nevada fills me with such joy. It first came to my attention for Supreme Court and then played a starring role as Curdsen Way in Little Miss Muffet. Now it’s inspired me a final time with Thata Way. It’s pure geo-oddity gold. I’ve pretty well exhausted the neighborhood, though.…
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Hundred Dollar Hamburger
Sometimes I wonder if I’m the last person to find out about things. A reader who identified himself as “Jasper” mentioned a $100 hamburger when I put out a call for southeastern Kentucky travel suggestions. I thought he was referring literally to a hundred dollar hamburger. Such a thing does indeed exist so I didn’t…
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(Mostly) Fictional Ferries
I receive an inordinate amount of visitor traffic on my Ferry Maps of the World site. Very few of those hits come from 12MC readers. It’s basically a lot of one-and-done landings from people who never return to the website ever again. Google decided it didn’t like me about a year ago or I was…
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Latitudinal Border Station Extremes
So I’m not sure the title adequately conveyed what I’m trying to describe. Unfortunately, I can’t think of a better concise title to replace it either. Conceptually, I wanted to know the northernmost and southernmost places in the world and in the United States where one could cross an international border by automobile via a…