And visitor number 5,000 is ...

... someone in Mountain View, California who got here by way of a Google search for "Eisenhower Locks map". Massena, New York is a long way from California. I hope you enjoy the trip.

Anyway, unlike most of the people who get here via
Google searches, you were actually able to get what you were after by following one simple link from my blog. I'm tempted to say that should be reward enough, but, seriously, if you happen to read this and if your travel plans ever include New York City, I'll be delighted to buy you a drink (or, if you're off the sauce or just not in the mood, a genuine Brooklyn egg cream - if you're allergic to eggs or lactose intolerant, no worries, as it contains neither egg nor cream).

Bite (see "comments" below) asks: How do you know the city and town the guy was from?

If you scroll down to the bottom of my blog, on the left side of the page you'll see a button that says "Sitemeter". Double-click on that, and you'll get a list of the last twenty visits to the blog. In most cases, as you can see, the list includes the location from which the hit came. Some computers are cagey and only disclose what country they're in, some others simply say "unknown".

I'll admit that there's some uncertainty over the actual location of my 5,000th visitor. The Sitemeter says "Mountain View", but I get an awful lot of hits from that location, which suggests that there may be a large corporate server (or two or three) there that serves a number of locations. For example, if I were to visit someone's blog using the computer in my office, which is in lower Manhattan, and that blog had a Sitemeter, my hit would be shown as coming from Philadelphia, because that's where the central server for the firm is located. So, when I say my 5,000th visitor was from Mountain View, I'm really making a semi-educated guess based on the best information I have.

What I really don't know is that this visitor was a guy.