Seattle is where exactly?

I made a fool of myself responding to a comment by Robin on my extended family posting the other day. Fortunately, it being my blog I managed to delete the comment fairly quickly and hopefully nobody read it... It revolved around Seattle being in Washington.

Like most folk I knew that Washington the state and Washington DC were different places but what I had failed to pick-up was that Seattle was in Washington. In my ignorance I thought it was somewhere around the Great Lakes. I had actually Google mapped it the other day but because I did so at a close-up level I hadn’t zoomed out and seen which state it was in. So, looking at Robin’s profile and seeing Seattle and Washington I had assumed she was in two places at once. After all, if GB can be in the Outer Hebrides and New Zealand why shouldn’t Robin be in Seattle and Washington, I thought. Oops.

I am aiming to learn a lot more about the USA as I travel around the postings of my fellow bloggers but it would help if I had some basic idea of the geography. Just as I was thinking that, along came the book “Stephen Fry in America” – a Christmas present to myself and Richard - which is divided into States. It looks to be a brilliant book and hopefully I shall avoid some basic schoolboy errors in future. Then again, I've just read chapter 1 - Maine - and discovered it has a Washington County. Maybe I'll just get even more confused.