An April 1 Travel Trivia Quiz

The usual April 1 routine among publications is to write up some ridiculous story and try to convince readers that it’s true. Today I’m going to reverse that.

All of these 12 travel trivia items have previously appeared in some form on clarknorton.com. Only one of them is false.

See if you can figure out which one is strictly for April Fool’s Day:

* St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, was actually born in Britain.

* Some of the most coveted and prestigious student residences at the University of Virginia have no bathrooms.

* Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa had 16 children; her 11 daughters were all named Maria or Marie.

* The small South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu has made millions of dollars by selling its Internet URL suffix .tv to companies that stream videos and the like.

* Zagreb, Croatia, has a Museum of Broken Relationships, containing artifacts from various failed love matches.

* The fifth generation of the Aranui, a series of ships sailing the remote Marquesas Islands (part of French Polynesia), eschewed the name “Aranui 5” because the French word for five, cinq, is pronounced “sank.”

* While there are approximately 4,000 different types of beer in Bavaria alone, Germany does not have the world’s highest average per capita beer consumption.

*  Before acquiring the name Roanoke in the 1880s, the Virginia city was known as “Big Lick.”

*  Lion World Travel’s eastern USA director of sales’ business card was, quote, “made by hand using the sanitized fibre from the dung of elephants, rhino and other wild herbivores of Africa.”

* Ithaca, New York’s, tourism promotion website once recommended that visitors avoid the frozen winter in that upstate New York city and head to the Florida Keys instead.

* If you were a modern-day Rip Van Winkle and slept for 20 years at the Super 8 motel in Kingston, New York, you would be charged more than $400,000 at today’s rates, (tax not included).

* VisitBritain, charged with luring tourists to Great Britain, once offered a tip to British hoteliers to help them avoid offending French visitors, namely: Don’t exchange a smile or make eye contact with anyone from France who you do not know.

Think you know the answer? I’ll have it for you in my next post (or, you could read all my previous blog posts…just saying…).

The first reader to email me (clark@clarknorton.com) with the correct answer wins a new car (April Fool!)