In a North Pole State of Mind; or, Other North Poles, Part 3

Hello! Have you voted to send my wife to the North Pole? Please do so! The North Pole in question is the real North Pole, not the Faux Poles in Alaska or Idaho that I've discussed previously.

I'd like to discuss yet another town that bills itself as "North Pole," which is accurate if you meant north of Albany:

Who knew that Santa was a New Yorker? North Pole, New York, is slightly west of I-87, that stretch of barren nothingness that delivers you from the state capital to Plattsburgh and Canada by plowing through the Adirondack Mountains. We made the trip to Plattsburgh last summer for my wife's brother's wedding, and I can tell you that driving on that part of I-87 is like being in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon with the wraparound background with the same pattern of tree-rock-sign-car looping every 10 seconds.

Consider that North Pole is 25 miles west of I-87, and the fact that driving in the mountains takes about three times longer than if you drove the same distance in the suburbs, and you'll conclude that the New York North Pole is probably more remote than the real North Pole.

It should come as no surprise that the New York North Pole tries to lure tourists with the Santa's Workshop theme. I suppose if the kids buy into the idea, and they're not so precocious that they carry a globe or a compass or a sextant, it beats going to the real deal, unless you're me and there's a chance you can send my wife there.

Lest you think the village was created by cynical modern marketers, it actually pre-dates the Disney parks, having been built in 1949. Do you have anything to add, Wikipedia?

Originally built on the road to Whiteface Mountain by a Lake Placid businessman whose daughter had desperately wanted to see Santa's house...

I don't mean to cut you off, Wikipedia, but if it were 1949 and my daughter wanted to see Santa's house (if it were this year, I would just fire up a photo of any large house on the Internet and say, "Look! Santa's house!"), I would have made some excuse like:

• "Santa's house is so secret that if you see it, you'll never get any presents."
• "Santa lives way, way at the North Pole, and the Boeing 747 required to make the trip won't be invented for another 20 years."

This guy builds her a town. That must have made all the other dads pretty happy. After that, my kid would have demanded to find out whether the moon is made of cheese, and I'd have to buy a million-pound ball of Swiss.

If you go to the official website of North Pole, New York, you'll notice there's not much going on, now that Christmas is over. There is a link on the site for employment but, sadly, it returns a "Sorry, the page you’re looking for can’t be found" page. Looks like hard times for everyone. Maybe the new Governor Cuomo can turn things around.

I also learned from the website that Maurices (no apostrophe), a clothing chain I've never heard of but which looks like a small-town Kohl's, had a little photoshoot at North Pole, and I found a link to a video. I expected to get a better look at the town, but instead I got this:

Would I send my wife to the New York North Pole? Probably not. She'd be bored pretty quickly, and it's only a six-hour drive, so she'd come home pretty quickly. Too quickly. Unless she had to share a room with the model in the video above and then they got snowed in and the heat went out and they had to stay warm by...

...where was I? Oh yeah. So, no New York North Pole for my wife. Send her to the real deal.

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If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please click this text which is in fact a link that will take you to her essay so you can vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.

The North Pole-tato; or, Other North Poles, Part 2

As I'd mentioned yesterday, there are a few places that are called "North Pole" that are not the North Pole, the place I want you to send my wife (you can assist me by voting for her essay).

Yesterday's North Pole was located in Alaska, which is inaccurate in terms of geography, but at least Alaska is close to the North Pole. The others are not. Today's North Pole is arguably the strangest of all of them.

I think if an episode of Family Feud asked, "Name something that's famous about Idaho," the Survey Says answers would be:

1. Potatoes (90)
2. Skiing (5)
3. The funny shape of the state (4)
4. Hemingway killed himself there (1)

If you said, "The North Pole is there," you'd be greeted with an annoying buzzer, a red X-in-a-box will flash over your face, and if your brood survives to battle in another episode you'll be banished to the slot at the very end of your family line, where the doddering geriatrics or spaced-out aunts usually stand.

North Pole, Idaho, does have a Wikipedia page. I'm not even going to link to it, because I can quickly tell you what it says. Enjoy:

North Pole is an unincorporated community in Kootenai County, Idaho, United States. North Pole is 3.5 miles (6 km) southwest of Athol.

The end.

Granted, the "town" does tend to provide Christmas-themed activities during the holidays, though those take place 18 miles away on the lovely Lake Coeur D'Alene at the Coeur D'Alene Resort in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho.

Holding "North Pole" events at a fancy-schmancy resort and not North Pole proper can be a bit misleading. Here is a photo of the resort, which I swiped from its website:

Note: The words in the photo ("Come Stay...," etc.)

do not actually float in the air and on the water.

And here is a photo, from Google Maps, of what is estimated to be downtown North Pole, Idaho:

View Larger Map

Here's another view, in case you thought you'd turn around to see Santa's workshop bustling with elves.

View Larger Map

Anyway. The Idaho version of the North Pole is more than 2,600 miles from home, but it's still not far enough for my wife to be sent. Maybe while she's at the real North Pole, I'll sneak off and hit the Coeur D'Alene Resort...their spa packages are quite inviting.

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If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please click this text which is in fact a link that will take you to her essay so you can vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.

Sarah Palin Can See This North Pole From Her Window; or, Other North Poles, Part 1

There are a few places that claim to be the North Pole that are actually not the North Pole. I want you to send my wife to the real North Pole, which you can do by voting for her essay, but a different North Pole — a city in Alaska — would be a decent fallback destination for my her.

"Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus,

right down Santa Claus Lane Badger Road!"

The city, whose website boasts that it's the site where the spirit of Christmas lives year 'round, is about 14 miles southeast of Fairbanks. This means that you can actually be north of the "North Pole." This geographical paradox aside, the city looks like a charming place to visit if:

1. You enjoy cities entirely based on theme
2. You enjoy cities entirely based on the theme of Christmas
3. You don't cringe when you learn the address of city hall is "125 Snowman Lane"
4. You're not looking for a mosque or synagogue or Buddhist temple

I like Christmas as much as the next guy who says "yes" to #4, but I can think of a few other theme-based locales I'd prefer to spend time, like Hershey, Pennsylvania, or PlayStation3 Island.

Who wouldn't want to dine at Taco Bell...at the NORTH POLE?

Apparently it's a big deal to send your mail up to North Pole, Alaska, in order to have it mailed with a postmark like this:

Personally — and you can cry HUMBUG if you want — I don't care for it. To make it look like Santa lives within the United States (all right, it's only Alaska, but you know what I mean) adds all the unnecessary baggage I don't like to think about when I think about Mr. Kringle:

• Does Santa pay state income tax?
• Is Santa registered to vote?
• Is Santa an undocumented alien?

According to my good friend Wikipedia, 6.7% of North Pole's residents live below the poverty line. Are these elves? What's Santa doing for them?

After thinking it over and spending more time blogging about North Pole, Alaska, than one reasonably should, I'd rather you send my wife to the real North Pole, or at least not this particular faux Pole — there are at least two others, which will be the subjects of future posts — because she would likely get so bored after about two days that she'd cut short her trip and return home.

And we can't have that.

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If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please click this text which is in fact a link that will take you to her essay so you can vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.

Could It Have Kilda to Pick a Place Even Further Away?

Imagine my disappointment when I realized that the North Pole would not be the furthest place on earth to send my wife. I don't know exactly where the voyage would take her, should she win the essay contest for which I'm asking you to vote, because there's no precise lump of land on which someone erected a giant peppermint stick.

So, using an online tool for plotting the distance between two points on a Google map, I ran a straight line from our town to the top of the map, and it generated a distance of just under 3,000 miles.

Three thousand miles. That's like flying to San Diego and then driving to San Francisco. In other words, it's not very far. Not very far at all, especially for a husband who's looking forward to having his wife far, far away for a couple of weeks.

Three thousand miles wouldn't even get her to Europe.

Hell, during her actual trip to Europe, Jenn was in Amsterdam (for only the museums, I've been assured), which is more than 3,500 miles away. But the North Pole has a lot fewer, uh, museums than Amsterdam, so I guess knowing she's in a remote part of the world is more important than how many miles she logs in order to get there.

I did find what seems to be a more remote place, a place where I'd like Jenn to visit sometime, that's also just 3,000 miles away: St. Kilda.

You've never heard of St. Kilda? Did you fail Obscure Geography 101? Behold:



It's the circled "A" on the map, just a bit northwest of England. Can't see it? Let me help:



I'll zoom in on the part with the thick black border.



Hmmm. Maybe we'll focus more on the blob of land.



Ah. Much better. To put it in perspective, this is the same size area in New York City, to the same scale:



Obviously, we're talking about a very remote piece of property. According to our friends at Wikipedia, "St Kilda (Scottish Gaelic: Hiort) is an isolated archipelago 64 kilometres (40 mi) west-northwest of North Uist in the North Atlantic Ocean. It contains the westernmost islands of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. The largest island is Hirta, whose sea cliffs are the highest in the United Kingdom."

Sounds fun, right? Jenn would be on Hirta, where she could chill out with the sheep and look for Viking burial grounds while I run out and buy a PS3 with the money we were saving for the family vacation. I'd bet the cellphone reception is better at the North Pole.

Of course, if the Scottish weather isn't agreeable for her, I'd suggest she try the other St. Kilda that exists in the world: the suburb just south of Melbourne in southern Australia, a mere 10,410 miles away.

If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please click this text which is in fact a link that will take you to her essay so you can vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.