It’s 5 o’clock somewhere…
The 5 o’clock club is published from time to time during the season, and aims to provide a forum for reader-driven discussion at a time of day when there isn’t much NFL news being published. Feel free to introduce topics that interest you in the comments below.
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We’ve almost reached the end of our trip across the desert of the offseason; the start of training camp is just days away. Still, we haven’t quite reached the refreshing waters of ‘real’ football news, so I thought we could help bridge the short remaining gap by doing something a little bit different today. For the site’s first-ever Hogs Haven census, we want to hear about where you live in the world.
All you have to do is leave your location information in the comments. We’re not looking for your address or any personal information — just the country or state is fine, and feel free to add the city too if you feel comfortable sharing that.
I’ll kick things off (we don’t expect you to provide a full biographical sketch like mine, but feel free to share as little or as much detail as you’d like):
As my username indicates, I live in Bangkok Thailand. A quick Google query tells me that I am 8,789 miles from Washington DC. Amazingly, that doesn’t make me the Hogs Haven member who lives the farthest away from Ashburn. In fact, I’m not even the most distantly-placed writer on the site. That distinction, I feel sure, goes to MattinBrisVegas, who, living as he does in Brisbane Australia, is 9,475 miles from the home of our beloved burgundy & gold if Google is to be believed. I can say, however, that I did, at one time, have Matt beat, since I lived for 11 years in Sydney Australia, which Google tells me is 9,756 miles from the Capitol building. Of course Google also suggests that a person can fly from Sydney to DC in under 18 hours. With connections, I never made the trip in less than a day, though, by crossing the international date line, I usually arrived in the US before I left Australia.
While I did grow up in the US, I wasn’t born there. My dad was in the US Navy, and in the post-war era of the mid-20th century, without modern airline travel, an overseas posting meant that the entire family moved abroad together. In the case of my family, that meant living in Morocco (North Africa) from 1958 to 1963. I was born in 1960, on the shores of the eastern Atlantic Ocean, about 180 miles south of the Rock of Gibraltar and about a day’s travel by car from the western edge of the great Sahara.
I first arrived in the US around the time of my 3rd birthday. My family lived for a year or two in Newport Rhode Island before returning to Norfolk Virginia, where my father had been stationed previously. I lived in Virginia — Norfolk as a kid, Richmond for college (VCU) and some years after, and several different locations in Northern Virginia (Fairfax, Alexandria, Crystal City, Manassas) during many of my working years — for almost 30 years before I hopped on a plane to relocate to Australia in 1994. I’m now 64 years old and freshly retired after a two decades as a teacher in Thailand, the last 14 of those years at the nation’s premier tertiary educational institution, Chulalongkorn University.
Now it’s your turn! Scroll down to the comments and let us know where in the world you are, like you’re Carmen Sandiego.
Below is a list of all 50 states plus US territories, and I’ll mark the ones where our readers reside in bold as answers come in. I’ll also update this post with any international locations shared by our readers, though I’ve kicked that part off with entries for Australia and Thailand already (and I’ve bolded a few US states for other members HH that I know about). As mentioned above, if you want to share any interesting details about your home or related topics in the comments, feel free — we all love interesting facts and stories!
United States
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
Washington, D.C.
Puerto Rico
US Virgin Islands
American Samoa
Northern Mariana Islands
Micronesia
Guam
Marshall Islands
Republic of Palau
International
Brisbane, Australia / Perth, Western Australia
Recife, Brazil / Valenca, Brazil
Cairo, Egypt
Canada, Ontario, Hamilton / Ottawa, Canada / Vancouver B.C.
Tydd Gote, Cambridgeshire, England / Borehamwood, Hertfordshire in the UK
Geneva Switzerland
Bangkok, Thailand / Lampang, Thailand