Geographically Challenged

The last few weekends have found our little family piling into the car and travelling up through Utah. One of the things that keeps us all busy is looking at licence plates and trying to keep track of how many states we see. A few weeks ago when we went camping, we were surprised to get over half of the states checked off our list.

M & K are right at the age where reading maps and figuring out where we are and calculating distances between this place and that is really interesting, so we've been trying to take advantage of their natural curiosity.

And then yesterday as we were just driving over to my mom's house, M was asking me a question, and he mentioned something about CanaDAYnians. I stopped him, mid-query.

"What did you just say?"

"CanaDAYnians. You know, people who are from Canada."

I cracked up. So did M. He loves being goofy and it's such a bonus when he gets a true belly-laugh out of someone. I never did answer his question; we were too busy laughing.

When I shared the story with my mom, she made a good point: there are lots of places that have weird names for their residents. I mean, who didn't get a good giggle back in junior high about the thought of someone from Hamburg, Germany being a Hamburger??

So what are you? And do you know anyone that claims an, ahhh, interesting title for where they reside?

By the way--we here in Las Vegas are Las Vegans. Pretty boring. But a little note to anyone who doesn't know---Nevada is properly pronounced Neh-va(the "a" as in "apple")-duh. I know, I know, the origin of the word is Spanish, and in that language, it is pronounced "Neh-vahhh-dahhh" (the middle syllable "a" like "auto") but if you're ever visiting and say it the second way, we Nevadans will KNOW you are not from here, and we'll probably roll our eyes and feel a pang of annoyance toward you. In fact, it's irritating enough that the latest campaign from the Nevada Tourism Board has this is its newest logo:The little smile above the "a" indicates the sound that should be made--short a.

Okay, I'm putting my English teacher hat away now =)