Geography

[billroper]

daisy_knotwise and I were driving down U.S. 45 in Des Plaines tonight and I remembered that if I stayed on the highway for most of the length of the state, I'd eventually pass through my dad's hometown of Carrier Mills.

As we compared notes on where we'd lived, Gretchen noted that this was the farthest north that she'd ever lived, DeKalb the farthest west and south, and Evanston the farthest east.

I've travelled a bit further. This is also the farthest north that I've lived, but Hawthorne, California is the farthest west, while Nimitz Hill, Guam is the farthest east and south.

How about you?

Comments

living spaces:

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

Farthest North: near downtown Milwaukee, WI
Farthest West: Lisle, IL (our old apartment here is a bit west of the house)
Farthest South and East: east side of Dayton, Ohio

[mdlbear]

Farthest East: Wilton, CT
Farthest North: Northfield, MN
Farthest West: Stanford, CA
Farthest South: San Jose, CA

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

North and west would be St. Paul, where my parents lived until I was about 6 months old. If you count places I actually remember living, it would be the apartment I had in Dobbins Downs in northwest Champaign.

South would be my mom's current house in Urbana, where I lived longer than any other place, though my current home is getting close.

East would be my current home in rural Vermilion County, IL, 20 miles east of Urbana.

So except for a few months before any of my memories, all of my dwellings have been within about 30 miles of each other. I've traveled a fair bit, but not moved my residence far.

[hvideo.livejournal.com]

North: Richland WA
South: San Diego CA
West: San Jose CA
East: Schenectady NY (unless you include living at college, which gets me a bit further east at Stony Brook, NY out on Long Island)

Reasonably near the top and bottom, left and right of the lower 48. Can't match southern FLA or anything overseas, though.

[tnatj.livejournal.com]

Farthest North and West, where I live now, Otsego, Michigan.
Farthest South, Portage, Michigan, with my family in this suburb of Kalamazoo. (I was born in Kalamazoo and lived the majority of my life in that city.)
Farthest East, Ann Arbor during my college years.

JPause to pull out my Rand McNally for fine-tuning comparisons

[msminlr.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm a map-geek.
But I needed to look to be sure Valparaiso IN is actually further east than Memphis TN.
It is.
So Valparaiso is my North/east-most point.
[pause to check something else]
Where we lived in Baytown TX is Just Slightly Further South than where we lived in Houston TX, but Houston IS further-west.

[drawshad.livejournal.com]

NOrth: Fairbanks, AK
South: El Paso, TX (or Killeen, TX - looking at Mapquest I can't quite tell)
East: Cleveland, OH (specifically Willowick)
West: Fairbanks, AK

Killeen by a nose

[hvideo.livejournal.com]

Killeen is just a smidgeon further south.

[jmthane.livejournal.com]

The farthest north and east would be Frankfurt, Germany. The farthest west and south would be Alamogordo, New Mexico.

[scarfman]

East and south: Louisville, Kentucky.
West: Omaha, Nebraska.
Is Wilmette or Detroit farther north?

Detroit by a hair

[hvideo.livejournal.com]

Detroit is just a little further north

[(Anonymous)]

Lessee. Farthest north and west, St. Paul, MN. Farthest east, Mt. Pleasant, MI.

Do colleges count? If so, farthest south, Holland MI.

A pretty circumscribed little life . . .

Corrections

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

One, the above was from me.

Two, it wasn't Holland, MI. It was Chicago. How the bleep could I forget Chicago?????

[ericcoleman]

The furthest west I have lived is Iowa ... unless you count a summer living on the Great Slave Lake in Canada, in which case it gets furthest west and north. The furthest east (and north, if ... see above) is London.

[pheltzer.livejournal.com]

Wow you consider Guam East? My mind automatically goes West for Guam since it's in the Pacific. Funny how the brain works. Or are you dividing based on the Date Line?

Anyway with a little help from wikipedia I can answer the rest:

East: Old Bridge, NJ
South: South Miami, FL
West: St. Louis, MO
North: Buffalo Grove, IL (By a whopping degree and a half)

[billroper]

Yup. If you don't divide based on the International Date Line, you get a mess. :)

And remember the slogan, "Guam: Where America's Day Begins!"

[pheltzer.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm I guess I've always thought of it in more Petercentric terms before. In other words... which direction am I most likely to travel to get to a location. So I guess for me the dividing line is probably somewhere in the Middle East/Western portions of Asia. Definitely not very good for dead reckoning I suppose.

[figmo.livejournal.com]

Meant to ask: How did you wind up living on Guam? Warren (my boyfriend) was stationed there when he was in the Coast Guard.

[billroper]

My dad was with the Joint Typhoon Warning Center on Nimitz Hill, Guam for two tours. His second trip there, he ran the place. :)

So I spent four years on Guam in first through third grades, then again in seventh and eighth grade.

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

Farthest Nortn and East: Harlaxton, England
Farthest South: Bloomington, IN
Farthest West: Deerfield, IL * Current residence

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

North: Hancock, MI
South: Bellevue, or Ann Arbor, MI (too lazy to check which is slightly further south)
East: Ann Arbor, MI
West, Hancock, MI

Boring, huh.

[rono-60103.livejournal.com]

I'm using the defination of "lived" as being an aparment or house owned or rented by me or my parents -- so I'll exclued extended (up to 4 months) hotel stays

Furthest North and East I've lived: Palatine IL
Furthest South and West I've lived: San Diego (Rancho Bernado) CA.

[ladyrutile.livejournal.com]

North: Duluth MN
South: Little Rock, AR
East: Chicago IL
West: Tacoma WA

Wait... I just checked. Bellevue WA is the furthest north. It's almost a degree north of Duluth.

[gorgeousgary]

North & East: Boston, MA
South & West: Atlanta, GA

Everything else has been around the Washington, DC and Baltimore, MD areas.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'm guessing Oxford is the farthest north and east I've lived. Nevada is the farthest west. And frankly I don't know whether Fairfax, VA or Champaign, IL are farther south.

[bschilli.livejournal.com]

Farthest East and South - Cairo, Egypt
Farthest North - Minocqua, Wisconsin
Farthest West - White Sands Missile Range, NM

Ben

P.S. - Nevada is farther South than Champaign, IL and mostly farther South of Fairfax, VA

[billroper]

Yeah. Las Vegas turns out to be a good bit south of Fairfax, which is about the same amount south of Champaign.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Duh. Yeah. I only barely count myself as having lived there, so once I used it for "West" I forgot that it also applied to "South."

La la la. Good thing my degrees aren't in geography, huh? *Grin*

[billroper]

I used to have a U.S. and a world map hanging on the wall for shortwave DXing. It helps. :)

[andpuff.livejournal.com]

Woo hoo! A reason to play with Google earth!

East: Shearwater, Nova Scotia
West: Esquimalt, British Columbia
North: Thunder Bay, Ontario
South: Milford, Ontario (ish)

I've never been more than three degrees off north to south, but I'm doing okay east/west.

[andpuff.livejournal.com]

I just remembered that I spent the winter of '77 in LA. But that was only three months...

[billroper]

Hey, that should count. I only spent a year in L.A.

[filkergem.livejournal.com]

South and West: Charlottesville, Virginia
North: Wakefield, Massachusetts
East: Cambridge, Massachusetts

[figmo.livejournal.com]

South and West: Los Altos Hills, CA (my first summer in CA)
North and East: Hempstead, NY (my first three years of college)

[lizneely.livejournal.com]

S: Tucson, AZ; W: Santa Cruz, CA; N&E: Marlboro Mass.

[jerusha.livejournal.com]

North: Des Plaines, IL
East: Pleasantville, NY
South: Pleasantville, NY
West: Westmont, IL

What's bizarre is, although I've lived in three states (NY, OH, IL), I've been within one degree of latitude my whole life. (Not counting visits of up to two weeks).

(I used zipinfo.com to get the latitude/longitude of all of my zip codes; I'm not sure I could have seen that much of a difference on a map.)