Friday 26 December 2008

Seattle is where exactly?

I made a fool of myself responding to a comment by Robin on my extended family posting the other day. Fortunately, it being my blog I managed to delete the comment fairly quickly and hopefully nobody read it... It revolved around Seattle being in Washington.

Like most folk I knew that Washington the state and Washington DC were different places but what I had failed to pick-up was that Seattle was in Washington. In my ignorance I thought it was somewhere around the Great Lakes. I had actually Google mapped it the other day but because I did so at a close-up level I hadn’t zoomed out and seen which state it was in. So, looking at Robin’s profile and seeing Seattle and Washington I had assumed she was in two places at once. After all, if GB can be in the Outer Hebrides and New Zealand why shouldn’t Robin be in Seattle and Washington, I thought. Oops.

I am aiming to learn a lot more about the USA as I travel around the postings of my fellow bloggers but it would help if I had some basic idea of the geography. Just as I was thinking that, along came the book “Stephen Fry in America” – a Christmas present to myself and Richard - which is divided into States. It looks to be a brilliant book and hopefully I shall avoid some basic schoolboy errors in future. Then again, I've just read chapter 1 - Maine - and discovered it has a Washington County. Maybe I'll just get even more confused.

3 comments:

  1. It's strange. My knowledge of the geography of the USA is limited to either places I've visited, the most obvious of the main cities (which definition means the most obvious to me!) and Seattle which I could have pinpointed on a map. However I could not have told you that it was in Washington so when I read the original posting I, like SS, thought that it was a reference to living in two places like I do.

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  2. We in the Colonies hardly think before throwing out city names and U.S. locations, assuming, I guess the rest of the world knows everything about us.

    I live in the Chicago suburban area, which is indeed along side a great lake, Lake Michigan. Not to be confused with the state of Michigan, which lies to the northeast of us.

    Seattle's a city I very much want to visit. Driving from where I live to Seattle would take at least three days. Probably four. The distances involved here in the U.S. are probaby boggling, too! It's a huge place. You're not to be blamed for mixing a few things up, SS!

    Worry not.

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  3. That's a great story! And just to confuse you even further, when you commented on my blog, I thought you were talking about the fact that I actually live in Kirkland, Washington, which is an eastern suburb (my daughter calls it the "outer burbs") of Seattle, and not Seattle itself!! It's a good thing that Google is building a new complex here in Kirkland. They'll make sure it's not just on a map, but is also completely photographed!
    Best wishes,
    Robin

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