Sunday, July 01, 2007

B & B

No doubt most of you will pick this one up easily, but where do you find these oddly-named locations?
Adirondacks
Capital-Saratoga
Central-Leatherstocking
Chautauqua-Allegheny

Finger Lakes
Greater Niagara
Thousand Islands-Seaway

They’re all in the state of New York. None of them sound much like the city of New York, which is what most of us think about when we think about NY, but it just goes to show that NY state is much more varied than we usually consider it to be.
(Greater Niagara reminds me of a couple of villages near where we’ve been staying in Norfolk: Great Melton and Little Melton. Curiously, the latter is the bigger place!)
Anyway, in all these places you can find a New York Bed and Breakfast.

And these are just the general area names. Within each of these are twenty to thirty more options, with names from origins as widespread as American Indian, Dutch, English and French. Amongst them are a Rome, an Amsterdam, a Dundee, a Berlin, and a Naples. Then there are a range of English placenames: Essex, Southampton, Durham, Grenwich (not Greenwich) and Windham (rather than the ‘proper’ spelling of Wymondham).
Corinth, Ithica, (and Ithaca) Utica, Hector, Troy and Syracuse add a Grecian touch.
None of them are quite as odd as some of the English place names that I’ve come across in Norfolk, but I’ll save that subject for another day.

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