21 Strange Things You Should Know about These United States

CURIOS! LOST VIKINGS! BEHEADED PUMPKINS! FALSE QUARTERS! & OTHER DISPUTED FACTS!!

1. Yes, Kansas IS flatter than a pancake. Anyone crossing I-70 swears by it, but a 2003 study using a cross-section of a flapjack actually determined Kansas flatter. It failed to mention that Delaware and Florida are actually flatter than Kansas.
2. The streaking craze actually began in the “Show Me State.” On Missouri University’s campus in Columbia, students took off sans knickerbockers in 1974. For some reason, it caught on.
3. The “Old Man of the Mountain” that appears on the New Hampshire state quarter is done gone and died. A 2003 rockslide smashed the formation, but he lives on on quarters and license plates.
4. John Deere tractors made in Iowa – incidentally the nation’s leader of hogs, corn and eggs – are green. On a factory tour in Waterloo, one worker explained the color choice, “Well, they can’t be red. BARNS are red.”
5. “American Pie”? Defintely NOT the plane Buddy Holley went down in, no matter what Don MacLean (or a drunk frat guy) sings. The plane that claimed the rock’n’roll pioneer at Clear Lake, Iowa, in 1959 was actually called the “N3794N.” In some ways, catchier.
6. New York City claims it has the best pizza in America. Not to Frank Sinatra, who was known for ordering pizzas from nearby New Haven, Connecticut.
7. There is a very interesting city in Louisiana by the name of New Orleans.
8. Forget Minnesota, Oklahoma had Vikings too. Or so claims folks around the Heavner Runestone south of Poteau in the state's hilly southeast. Supposedly dating to 750 AD, the carvings seem real, but modern science types doubt their authenticity. Anglo-Saxons made that mistake too.
   
9. First subway in the states? That’d be Boston not New York.
10. Some like to brag Delaware is the only state east of the Mason-Dixon Line. A severed part of it is actually too east. By topographical accident, the 12-Mile Arc (meant to solve quibbles between Lord Baltimore and William Penn) accidentally claims bit of New Jersey, across the Delaware River, now part of the sad, unclaimed “East Delaware.” Technically it’s not Jersey, though all you find there is weeds and empty beer bottles (shown below).
11. It’s said the Maine Coon Cat are descendants of Marie Antoinette’s pets. She apparently wanted them to live in America, and lost her head for it.
12. In Montana, livestock outnumber people (on two or four legs) 12 to 1.
13. No one knows what state was inaugurated first, North or South Dakota. In one swoop in 1889, both were blindly signed in back to back. In books though North gets the nod as the 39th state, South the 40th, due to the alphabet.
14. Paul Bunyan? Some say real. But he NEVER would have worn blue jeans, like modern-day lumberjacks (or his disfactual statues in Minnesota). Levi Strauss turned old-world denim into blue jeans in 1872, while Bunyan’s legend dates from the 1830s.
15. Roswell thinks of itself as UFO nation. Not to Max, Nebraska. Max farmers were terrorized by aliens in 1884, well before Roswell was founded.
16. Most disparate temperatures in the US: Fort Yukon, Alaska, where it reaches 100 degrees in summer and 80 below in winter.
17. Rhode Island’s real name is Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, which is just absurd. And should be mandated to be, in full, on their license plate.
    
18. Iowa City and San Antonio don’t like each other. Each claims to have the world’s biggest nickel: Iowa’s is 16’ x 3”, San Antone’s is 13’ x 4”, but is – locals remind you – double sided. “Like real nickels are.”
19. The ice cream cone is, some say, a St Louis accident. When cups ran out during the 1904 World’s Fair, an ice-cream vendor lifted some Belgian waffles when the Belgian waffle vendor was flirting with the Swiss chocolate exec, and tailor-rigged “cones” in real time.
20. Forget the Vikings or Chris Columbus, Alabama claims Welsh Prince Madoc made it to Alabama in 1169 – on a strict A-to-B Wales-to-Bama itinerary apparently. No other region in the US seems to claim a visit to Madoc and his princely outfits.
21. The song “Take Me Home, Country Roads” is a damned lie. John Denver name-drops West Virginia, but it’s inspired by Maryland’s backroads: that's a completely different state. Reminds one how Omaha tends to get treated. One Counting Crows song places it “somewhere in middle America” while Groucho Marx put it in “the foothills of Tennessee.” Ah, life before GoogleMaps…

Most Expensive Airport: Huntsville?

Photo by freethehops, via Flickr

This week we learned that Huntsville, Alabama is the nation's most expensive airport (average fares reached $471 in the last quarter). Or is it?

Barbie Peek, a Crimson Tide grad and a director at the Huntsville International Airport, says that number is a bit misleading. She told me "68 percent" of the 1.2 million annual flights landing there are "on business" and paying "higher business fares." And the report, taking in the nation's top 100 airports (Huntsville actually ranks 111th in passenger traffic, alas), excluded the most expensive ones ("no Alaska or Hawaii airports").

What's more, according to my own research, it's not really true. Looking at roundtrip economy-class fares of select routes leaving January 29, Huntsville was actually the cheapest:

• Newark, New Jersey --> Huntsville ($301)
• Seattle --> Tucson ($309)
• Tulsa, Oklahoma --> Casper, Wyoming ($331)
• Anchorage --> Nome, Alaska ($442)
• Grand Forks, North Dakota --> Chicago ($492)
• Los Angeles --> Hilo, Hawaii ($644)
  

If you go to Huntsville (called "H-Vegas" locally), there are a few things to watch for.

• SCIENCE NON-FICTION. Huntsville is home to the greatest three-day $449 program of all time: adult Space Camp (as featured in the underrated Will Ferrell movie Stranger than Fiction). It's connected with the city's top attraction, the Rocket & Science Center Museum, which shows how Huntsville helped put a man on the moon by attracting German rocket-building scientists in the '50s. The museum also explains how astronauts use the toilet.
  

• HISTORIC DISTRICTS. Elsewhere in town are several historic districts, including the antebellum mansions of Twickenham.

• MOUNTAINS. This part of Alabama, near the Georgia/Tennessee tri-state border, isn't a flat delta. Just east of town, the 2100-acre Monte Sano State Park is home to a 1600-foot mountain with trails going up for views.

• FOOD. The "fine dining" scene of Huntsville has grown in recent years. For a "local yokel kinda place," Peek recommended the BBQ at Greenbrier (around since 1957).

76-Second Travel Show: "Traveling with Beard & Darth Vader's REAL Mask"

Episode #007

F E A T U R I N G * 4 0 * B O N U S * S E C O N D S

Links: Christoph Rehage's unreal travel video, The Longest Way -- see it on YouTube; New York's Metropolitan exhibit "The Art of the Samurai" (through January 10); a couple good beard resources: Christopher Oldstone-Moore's "The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain" and an article "Growing a Beard." Music: San Francisco's mighty Tender Few.

SSTS viewer Leif Pettersen, and blogger at KillingBatteries.com, wrote in about beards -- he's thinking of growing a "vast, luxurious one" but wonders about hygiene and its effect on his "attractiveness" on the road.

I made my travel beard debut along with my first-ever head shaving while updating Lonely Planet's Central America guide in 2003. It was a big sprawling, "terrorist" beard by the end of the trip -- my mom didn't recognize me when I got back.

I learned two key things:

1. There's a bald club. I didn't realize it but bald people -- shaved bald, at least -- stop each other on the street and exchange tips. At least it happened in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, in southern Mexico, where a gringo stopped to note that "you lose heat far quicker without hair up there; wear a hat." I did.
2. The street-respect the wildly bearded garner. Not talking moustaches, soul patches, the dreadful goatee or trimmed George Michael beards (see right). But real beards. They can only mean two things to passerby on the sidewalks del mundo: a) you're a sciencey genius (see here for more on scientists and beards); b) you're a freak. Either way, you win. No one messes with geniuses or freaks.

I've had plenty of "accidental, organic" beards since 2003 -- like the one I grew for episode seven, in solidarity with Leif. And generally draw the line against anything manicured. If you need to trim it, make it look pretty, cut the thing off.

But one warning. Beards sometimes take a life of their own, evident in the anonymously created (now defunct) Twitter account @mikebarishbeard -- tributing the frequently rich facial decor of travel writer Mike Barish.

--> The STTS will try to answer all viewer questions.

Bearded in Kamchatka, Russia (before it was a Williamsburg staple)

76-Second Travel Show: "Travel Magazine Olympics (Oct/Nov)"

Episode #006

F E A T U R I N G * 44 * B O N U S * S E C O N D S

We understand the time constraints on your life. We understand, too, you like to dream. That's why SSTS has poured through five travel magazines for the October/November 2009 period and picked out the three best contributions for you to read.

Only one is available online. All three are examples of how the best travel works: anyone who is passionate about something will make you care about it too, even if you know nothing about it. Even bullriding.

• GOLD: Afar's piece on how french bread rebounded from "mediocrity" in the '80s to something worth detouring for in Paris. It's written by an amateur DC bread-maker who tries by error to learn how to make bread the French way. I hadn't realized how much culture and pomp were in all those baguettes. I should have known. I'll certainly look at them differently whenever I get back to Paris.
  
• SILVER: Conde Nast Traveler's Readers Awards will get the attention in its November issues, but the best piece is about the glorious alcoholic roots of New Orleans. The long intro makes you ashamed of your own drinking scene (seriously ashamed), and it gets capped with a surprisingly readable list of the 38 best bars in town. Maybe I should move to New Orleans.
  
• BRONZE: American Cowboy, that's right American Cowboy, devotes about half of its pages to travel, and the most entertaining piece zeroes in on the most popular part of the rodeo: bullriding. Illustrations show the best and worst rides of all time, plus details on different leagues, scoring systems and where to see it next (like Las Vegas' championships ending today). It looks better in print than its website.
  

76-Second Travel Show: "What's the Deal with Pittsburgh?" (CANCELLED)

Episode #005

E X A C T L Y * 7 6 * S E C O N D S * ( B U T * C A N C E L L E D)

A recent visit to champion city (last year's Super Bowl and Stanley Cup ribbons reside in Pittsburgh) loomed with potential.

For once we could find out:

• How do locals enjoy the three rivers?
• When two rivers meet to make a third, isn't that really just two rivers?
• Why is the Ohio River named "Ohio" and not "Pennsylvania" (where it begins) or "Illinois" (where it ends)? Seriously.
• Why is there that "h" at the end of Pittsburgh? We noticed Charles Dickens spelled it "Pittsburg" in his book "American Notes." And he's the guy behind Tiny Tim.
• The history and background of the city any good?
  
• Hey, what's a great local diner for breakfast?
• Where does one see local concerts? Preferably outdoors?
  
• While we're at it, any interesting wall art or public sculptures to see?

But Pittsburgh, and in particular country star Kenny Chesney, did not cooperate with SSTS plans for a civic look into Pennsylvania's second-biggest city.

As a unsurprising result, the producers of the "76-Second Travel Show" ban Kenny Chesney and his agent from viewing or participating in our program for three months.

76-Second Travel Show: "Halloween in Transylvania"

Episode #004

F E A T U R I N G * 3 5 * B O N U S * S E C O N D S

Transylvania is best known for a possibly bi-curious fanged creature who was concocted by a Irishman, Bram Stoker, who never visited the country. Some who visit have Dracula in mind, but it starts to dissipate around the time one sees the hokey Dracula souvenir stands outside Bran's "Dracula Castle" -- s0-called because the real-life, quite-moustached Vlad Tepes (after whom Dracula was based) may have come by for an overnighter and a steak sandwich. Or not.

The book took places in the valley northeast of Bistrita, far north. The campy (in a bad way) "Dracula Castle Hotel" built by enterprising communists in the '70s is far from the medieval flavor you'd expect. And the $1 trip to "Dracula's tomb" one-time so startled a Canadian tourist, he suffered a heart attack when a costumed Drac burst out of his coffin. It's not really worth the drive.

But TRANSYLVANIA is wonderful, weird and gorgeous, possibly the most bizarre and interesting part of Europe I've seen. With countless Saxon villages with churches and homestays to the south and the ethnic Hungarian heart of Szekely Land, including great destinations of Cluj Napoca and Targu Mures.

You can hike, ski, castle-hop you're way across the huge area between Bucharest and Hungary, but best -- if you don't mind the drivers -- is renting a car and hitting backroads, where you are the alien to most locals, who whip off mountains, over the road, and up another hill via horse cart.

Cars? Roads? Who needs them in Transylvania?

Three things I tell my friends to do in Transylvania:

1. Spend a couple nights at Mioritica, a homestay in Sibiel village west of Sibiu. It's run by a local teacher, who shares the drinks, invites clarinetists over and puts the beer in the chilly brook running by the few rooms. Email coldeasv [at] yahoo [dot] com.
   
2. Rent a car a couple days. Roads can be awful, but back roads to random Saxon villages, with churches and homestays, opens up the region's past.
3. It's fine to go to Bran Castle (the over-billed Dracula castle), but spooky castle at Hunedoara (an otherwise gray, communist town most miss) looks more the part.

This episode's footage includes a Roma (gypsy) horse fair outside Odorhieu Secuiesc, the Praid Salt Mine (I think -- maybe its the one in Turda?), the mountains of Apuseni Mountains west of Cluj, and a certain scientist from the Pharmacy Museum in Cluj. Some of it may seem a bit grim. That's on me and this Halloween theme. Transylvania is worth it.

76-Second Travel Show: "Window or Aisle Seat?"

Episode #003

F E A T U R I N G * 9 4 * B O N U S * S E C O N D S

Paul Brady (@p_brady) offers the SSTS* its first-ever viewer query: which is the preference, window or aisle. We've turned over the question to some travel experts: Jim Benning (World Hum, @jimbenning) Pam Mandel (of Nerd'sEyeView), Stefanie Michaels (aka "AdventureGirl"), Jessica Spiegel (Boots'n'All, and @italylogue) plus Tony and Maureen Wheeler (the founders of Lonely Planet).

Plus Pat.

...& WHAT ABOUT MARK TWAIN?
Paul also wondered about Mark Twain -- is he the most underrated or overrated travel writer?

It's an interesting question, and one I had been thinking of as I just finished Life on the Mississippi, a sloppy book that begins with Twain's reports of life during the steamboat era when the river bank moved so often that parts of Mississippi state regularly found itself on the Louisiana side of the border. Then follows his experiences years later, when he revisited well after the steamboat era was nearly over.

Parts should be skipped, parts relished -- like most of his writing.

But I can't call him overrated. Twain tends to color all his books with a fictive landscape of scalliwags, boasters and liars. Even his non-fiction. It can be distracting, but it has it place. I think Innocents Abroad, following his Europe-by-ship trip, does to Europe a bit what Bob Dylan's Bringing it All Back Home album did to the British Invasion. Kinda made fun of it.

Dylan's cover is lined with American contributions to pop music -- sort of calling the Beatles the ladle to American soup -- while Twain, and his moustache, reversed needling inspection of the Tocquevilles and Dickenses. America hadn't seen that before. And it struck a chord. In his lifetime, Innocents Abroad outsold Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.

Plus the "is he dead?" jokes are hilarious.

So I give the guy credit. You with me?

--> The SSTS welcomes all travel queries.

*SSTS = 76-Second Travel Show