Friday, November 5, 2010

subtly advertising your place

Have you seen the M22 stickers on people's vehicles in northern Michigan?
It replicates the Michigan State Highway 22 highway sign, which in Michigan is white letters on a black diamond on a white square. I've seen the stickers and wondered about the significance of M2 but never really looked into it.

I saw one of those stickers on a colleague's desk this morning and asked about it. So now I know. M22 is the highway around the Leelanau Peninsula, indeed a very cool place. So, unlike the Route 66 nostalgia, it's not so much the state of mind of the road, it's the place the road goes through people are celebrating by adorning their vehicle with the M22 sign.

There's also a similar for M119, tunnel of trees highway north of Petoskey (in an earlier post I had referred to 'the tunnel of trees highway north of Traverse City, and while Petoskey is north of TC, 'north of TC' is Old Mission Peninsula -- another very cool place indeed.)

I think the EUP is a pretty cool place and I have a subtle statement to that effect on my vehicles -- the oval "UP" sticker based on the Euro vehicle tags. That format has become pretty popular for any number of places. An EUP oval would be better, but I haven't seen them for sale at our tourist shops. My other choice would be the "Say yah to da UP, eh?" which I do appreciate but maybe isn't exactly as subtle as I'm looking for.

What similar sense-of-place tags do people in your place use?

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