Name of This Game Is Getting There

I take exception with Mr. Shakespeare. For me, there’s a lot in a name.

A rose might smell as sweet if it were called ornithogalum, but would it inspire poetry?

Would I sigh as much over Bora Bora if the island had been named Cook, after the intrepid captain?

Would I have stood in line so eagerly for the movie “On Golden Pond” if it had been called “On Squam Lake” for the New Hampshire setting where it was filmed?

I doubt it. The rhythm of names has always lured me on.

Tegucigalpa. Tlaquepaque. Katmandu. Mombasa. Zihuatanejo.

Of those, Zihuatanejo remains the most intriguing, as I have not yet been there.

For a while I suspected that vowels might be the secret factor in my travel plans. But a friend from Toledo, Ohio, assures me that vowels alone do not guarantee a dreamy destination.

Still, I could never resist a mountain called Kilimanjaro, a lake called Titicaca, a town called Wuxi. I would go extra miles to see a beach named Kaanapali, a volcano named Popocatepetl, an island named Bali or Corfu. The compelling stone calvaries of Brittany are in villages with complex names--Plougastel-Daolas is worth a detour.

As I drive in California on a rainy day, glorious sounds tumble through my mind: Abu Simbel, Addis Ababa, Asuncion, Bodo, Bombay, Chipping Campden, Concarneau, Dar es Salaam.

The whoosh of traffic fades as I take fanciful journeys to Delphi, Hokitika, Jujuy, Kandy, Kyoto, Izmir, Ipanema, Marrakech, Maracaibo.

The light changes and I am off to Nova Levante, Novosibirsk, Riyadh, Rovaniemi, Santiago de Compostela, Srinigar, Tashkent, Valparaiso, Wollongong, Yalta, Zell am See.

It is a miracle that I ever get anywhere, with all that lovely distraction.

Before leaving on a trip I whisper names in practice and anticipation; afterward they glimmer in my head at the most outrageous times.

A cactus in a nursery reminds me of the thorny shrubs that are used to form natural corrals near Casablanca. A simple basket reminds me of three Indian weavers I met in Punta Arenas, as well as a Lapp in Lapland.

Music underscores memories. I used to smile at the tune “Managua, Nicaragua.” I was a pushover for “Old Cape Cod.” I searched Irish road maps for Gloccamorra, until a pub keeper in Limerick told me that he couldn’t say how things were there since the village was invented by a New York songwriter.

Books--both fiction and nonfiction--fire up the urge to travel. I even spend time reading atlases, and cluck with satisfaction to learn that Kuala means river mouth or estuary, which is why so many Malaysian towns have that first name. Bad means bath or spa--which explains all the Bad names in Germany and Austria.

In fact, if you knew all the foreign terms for hill, swamp, cape, dune, mountain and bay, you could translate a lot of the world map.

Yet in all the United States there is only one town named Rose (Nebraska).

There is no Ornithogalum.