Moving from So Cal to Wisconsin comes with several adjustments: the leaves change colors and fall, there’s actually a Winter, public bathrooms don’t offer toilet seat covers, and some of the addresses are a bit funny looking.

The reason my blog posts are all questions is that I have some legitimate questions which I feel are not rhetorical; I feel like someone, somewhere knows the answer. Better yet, I love the idea that someone reading this has never thought twice about this question. That’s my favorite part of moving – something you’ve taken for granted and accepted as normal your whole life might be completely different and unusual to another person. Sharing these questions and experiences can be a wonderful, eye-opening experience.

When I tried to ask my husband about these kinds of addresses, he was not as amused as I was. He’s a mechanical engineer and says this kind of geographical coordinate addresses make sense. There’s longitude and latitude and the numbers of the address correspond to those longitudes and latitudes…or something like that.

But wait,… I’m still confused.

So if my address is N55 W1234, do I have an “ADDRESS DOPPELGANGER”, like how The Flash has a Barry Allen doppelganger on Earth 2? Is there an address for S55 W1234? Or W55 N1234? Or even N55 E1234? How does this work?

The other part of my confusion-curiosity is about where it starts/ends. It’s like that time in college where the moon looked so enormous, I started walking toward it, as if it was a rainbow with a pot of gold at the bottom. (Yes, I was sober, but I was also bored) I

I wonder if I’m N55, where is N01? After driving for only 15 minutes, I saw the first address metric, the N##, go up by two whole points. So I can only imagine how much it would change if I continued on for an hour.

Dropping random pins in Google Maps doesn’t help answer any of my questions because these numbers don’t seem to correspond to my address, and dropping pins in a straight(ish) line from Alabama to Wisconsin doesn’t change the GPS numbers the same way I see them change when I drive around town.

Also, I wonder why Wisconsin does this. Who made the decision to use these types of addresses? Did other parts of the country start with these kinds of addresses then move on to the more conventional “123 Main Street” addresses?

So many questions. Do you have any answers? Do you have any weird address experience to share?

Thank you for reading/following/subscribing/liking/sharing. ~GreenEyedGuide