The town so nice, they named it twice
My friend Ann emailed me the other day to ask whether I could give her any tips on travelling overland from Toronto to Boston in April. I’ve done Montreal to Boston before, taking the Greyhound after recovering from a case of La varicelle and suffering acid reflux from eating 3 tomatoes and an orange before getting on the bus. Therefore, I looked distinctly dodgy at the US border, which coming soon after 9/11 wasn’t really the best look in front of the armed US Immigration Officers.
I haven’t done T.Dot to Beantown before though. Which brings me to the title of my post.
I went to Google Maps to see how far apart Toronto and Boston are…and for some reason I thought “I wonder what happens when I type “T Dot” in. T Dot being a nickname for Toronto. Lo and behold…
T Dot
This set off a chain of events where I discovered that typing certain nicknames for cities into GMaps zoomed immediately into the city in question.
For example:
- Beantown = Boston
- Mile High City – Denver
- The Windy City = Chicago
- The city that never sleeps = New York City
- Tinseltown = Hollywood
- Spamtown USA = Austin, Minnesota
- The City of Angels = Los Angeles
- The town so nice they named it twice = Walla Walla, Washington
This may be old news, however I couldn’t find any previous references to this Google Easter Egg…so I now have high hopes that this post is going to be my new Exenger/Fakenger article…i.e my most popular post!
Can youse find any more? Let me know in the comments.
Bien sur dreaming spires gets straight to oxford
my last comment was bollocks
Well, it seems like it’s not so much an Easter Egg but the result of the GMaps feature “Add a place to the map”. Mystery solved.
I just added “City of Dreaming Spires” for Oxford and now it works!
Goog explain it here:
FWIW Toronto-Boston is about a 10-hour drive, probably 16 hours on a bus. There is a “Maple Leaf” Amtrak service from Toronto to NYC, not sure if you can change somewhere along it to go to Boston instead. But it was expensive the last time I looked.
I would fly…
Ah, amtrak says you actually have to connect in NYC which means you have to do a 4-hour trip to NYC, then have a 5-hour connection from 2am-7am, then a 12-hour marathon trip with only a snack car on-board. Getting there after 21 hours.
I would so fly
Actually, having played with the Add a place to the map feature, the results of adding The City of Dreaming Spires is not the same as the Walla Walla et al. More detail in a follow-up post, I think. If I can be arsed